“Station Island”
“Station Island”
THE LITERARY WORK
A poem in 12 sections, set at Lough Derg in County Donegal, Ireland: first published in 1984.
SYNOPSIS
Heaney travels to an ancient pilgrimage site and, as he undertakes its rituals, confers with the spirits of the dead.
Events in History at the Time of the Poem
Seamus Heaney was born in 1939 to a farming family in Mossbawn, County Deny, about 30 miles northwest of Belfast, Ireland. He has written that this rural childhood attuned his ear to the conflicting claims in the sounds of words, as local Irish voices contrasted with “the official idioms” of radio reports from England and that it opened his eyes to the etymology of local place-names and their legendary origins (Heaney, “The Nobel Lecture,” Opened Ground, p. 418). Heaney left Mossbawn in 1951 for college at St. Columb’s in Londonderry and Queen’s University in Belfast, where he would later teach as a member of the English Department. During his time there he published his first two books of poems, The Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969). In 1972, Heaney left this “perfectly agreeable job” in Belfast for a small farm in Glanmore, County Wicklow, south of Dublin in Republican Ireland. There, Heaney proposed to concentrate exclusively on writing, “to put the practice of poetry more deliberately at the centre of my life” (Heaney, Preoccupations, p. 11). Four years later, after completing many of the poems in Wintering Out (1972), North (1975), and Field Work (1979), he returned to teaching, first at Caryfort College in Dublin, then at Harvard University, where he still works. Station Island (1985), written in the first years after Heaney’s return from Glanmore, takes its name from the central sequence in which the poet faces shades from his personal and literary past. Along with his translations of Beowulf (2000), Sophocles’s Philoctetes (as The Cure at Troy, 1991) and the medieval Irish poem Buile Suibhne (as Sweeney Astray, 1983), “Station Island” is among Heaney’s most ambitious work. In it, he emerges as a poet of deep concern for history and for his own time.
Events in History at the Time of the Poem
“The Troubles.”
Conflict over British governance of Ireland dates back to the medieval period, and the twentieth century saw this conflict rise to armed rebellion. After the 1916 rising, in which Irish rebels (the Sinn Féin) seized and held sections of Dublin, the Anglo-Irish Treaty (1921) provided independence for the 26 southern counties, predominantly Catholic, where resistance had been strongest; the new Irish Free State (later Eire, or the Republic of Ireland) had its capítal in Dublin. The United Kingdom retained control over the six predominantly Protestant counties of Northern Ireland (or Ulster), governed by a local parliament that met in Belfast. This compromise, like any other, left many unsatisfied on both sides of the new border. Irish Unionists (Fenians) in the South pressed for Home Rule for the whole island, and Northern Catholics found themselves marginalized and disempowered in an increasingly sectarian Northern state. Political relations between the Republic of Ireland and Great Britain went through cycles of strain and relative amicability over much of the twentieth century, the stakes of their contention being rule of the six counties of the North.
Tensions rose between Ulster’s Protestant majority and the Catholic minority during the 1960s, a decade of Catholic civil-rights protests modeled on the protests in the interest of African Americans in the southern United States. In August 1969, after a difficult general election and the resignation of Terence O’Neill as Northern Ireland’s Prime Minister, rioting erupted in the streets of Derry and Belfast: small mobs of one sect or party attacked buildings or organizations belonging to another, and retributions escalated. Police found themselves uncomfortably in the middle of this chaos, besieged with rocks and homemade gasoline grenades from both sides. By the end of the month, British troops were on the streets to help manage the crowds, a temporary solution that naturally brought tensions higher.
A political conference in Republican Ireland at the end of the year saw the Sinn Féin split over the best means for reclaiming Ulster. The more radical or aggressive side of this schism formed the Provisional IRA (or “Provos”), a group committed to the destruction of British rule in Ulster by any means. The Irish Republican Army, or IRA, had always been the military wing of the Sinn Féin; the Provos, however, would direct and foment guerrilla and terrorist attacks on targets in Northern Ireland itself. The year 1971 saw a string of such attacks (shootings and bombings) that brought about the formation of small Protestant paramilitary groups to balance the Provos. Ulster police and British troops were granted powers of internment without trial against anyone suspected of terrorist (specifically Provisional IRA) activity.
On January 30, 1972 (“Bloody Sunday”), police fired into the crowd at an agitated Catholic protest rally, killing thirteen. Later that year Northern Ireland’s Prime Minister was dismissed by Britain’s Edward Heath, and Ulster came under direct British control. The guerrilla violence escalated, and Belfast became the site of almost-daily protests (which often included assaults on troops or police called out to monitor the crowds), gunfire, and bombings. Between 1970 and 1995, more than three thousand people were killed in the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, and blame seems impossible to assign: like the spirits released from Pandora’s box, or like fire spilled from a censer, the violence of the Troubles was easily released, and impossible to contain.
This was the Belfast in which Heaney lived during the late 1960s (and until 1972), a city under siege from within, where random violence could erupt without warning—although when asked about the violence he found himself answering, “things aren’t too bad in our part of the town: a throwaway consolation meaning that we don’t expect to be caught in crossfire if we step into the street” (Heaney, Preoccupations, p. 30). Heaney, by temperament, is chiefly interested in the local effects of this political strife: the nearby sound of gunfire or rumbling of a bomb, the sectarian murder (or accidental shooting) of an acquaintance, the tense silence in a period of relative peace. “We survive explosions and funerals,” Heaney wrote, as if the two threats, of death and grief, are almost equivalent, “and live on among the families of the victims” (Heaney, Preoccupations, p. 30).
St. Patrick’s Purgatory, Lough Derg
Lough Derg is a fair-sized body of water in the southern part of Donegal, Republican Ireland’s northernmost county. Because the twentieth-century lines of partition between Ulster and the Republic are demographic and not geographic, County Donegal has a much longer border with Northern Ireland than with County Sligo, the only fellow Republican Irish county that it borders. It is therefore difficult to reach Lough Derg from Dublin without crossing the patrolled border twice (Byron, pp. 15-19); for similar reasons, Lough Derg may have taken on especially strong significance for Northern Catholics during the last eighty years. (The Lough Derg of Heaney’s poem should not be confused with the larger lake of the same name that borders Counties Galway, Clare, and Tipperary, farther south in the interior of the Irish Republic.)
The island within Lough Derg called Station Island or (more properly) St. Patrick’s Purgatory has been the site of religious pilgrimage for Catholics seeking penance or religious vision for many centuries, possibly since the advent of Christianity in Ireland. St. Patrick, Ireland’s patron saint, is said to have spent a week on an island in Lough Derg during his missionary work in the late fifth century, and to have been granted there “a vision of Purgatory and the torments of Hell,” though neither Patrick’s writings nor historical evidence place the patron saint at Lough Derg for any length of time (Cunningham, p. 11). Station Island may have received visitors even in St. Patrick’s era, and we know it to have been a site of monastic settlement in the ninth century and again in 1135 (Curtayne, p. 27).
It seems likely that the legend of Patrick’s vision is a combination of local lore with later tales of missionaries and pilgrims. For example, the lake takes its name (derg is Irish for “red”) from its ruddy color, legendarily drawn from the blood of a monstrous worm or serpent slain there by Conan, the son of the Irish giant-hero Finn Mc-Cool. Unable to injure the creature’s hide, Conan arranged to be swallowed along with the monster’s daily ration of cattle, then hacked it apart from the inside. Other versions of the legend have the serpent slain by St. Patrick, or, in a curious mixture, St. Patrick helping Conan by pinning the mortally wounded serpent to the lake-bottom as it bled to death. The actual ruddiness of Lough Derg’s waters is due to iron oxides from nearby rocks, but tension between the Christian and pagan origin myths of Lough Derg may be as important as the facts of chemistry.
The tradition of Patrick’s vision of Purgatory and Hell may also be related to the twelfth century narrative of the Knight Owen, a wandering Crusader who came to Station Island to fast and to do penance. (The later narrative may have crept back into the legends about St. Patrick, or the earlier story may have colored the tale of the Knight Owen. From this historical distance, it is nearly impossible to tell, since both men are known chiefly by the fantastic narratives told about them.) Part of this penance exercise
“ONE OF THE MOST HARROWING MOMENTS . . .”
One of the most harrowing moments in the whole history of the harrowing of the heart in Northern Ireland came when a minibus full of workers being driven home one January evening in 1976 was held up by armed and masked men and the occupants of the van ordered at gunpoint to line up at the side of the road. Then one of the masked executioners said to them, “Any Catholics among you, step out here.” As it happened, this particular group, with one exception, were all Protestants, so the presumption must have been that the masked men were Protestant paramilitaries about to carry out a tit-for-tat sectarian killing of the Catholic as the odd man out, the one who would have been presumed to he in sympathy with the IKA .ind .ill ils actions. It was a terrible moment for him, cau between dread and witness, but he did make a motion to step forward. Then, the story goes, in that split second of decision, and in the relative cover of the winter evening darkness, he felt the hand of the Protestant worker next to him take his hand and squeeze it in a signal that said no, don’t move, we’ll not betray you, nobody need know what faith or party you belong to. All in vain, however, for the man stepped out of the line; but instead of finding gun at his temple, he was pushed away as the gunmen opened fire on those remaining in line, for these were not Protestant terrorists, but members, presumably, of the Provisional IRA.
(Heaney, “The Nobel Lecture,” Opened Ground, pp. 421-22)
was a 24-hour vigil kept while sealed in a cave, and when the Knight Owen’s vigil began, he had a vision of the afterlife, in which he “struggled with demons and was consoled by angels; he walked through Hell; he was admitted to the portals of Paradise” (Curtayne, p. 30). This possibly apocryphal, or fictitious, story, recorded by Friar Henry of Saltrey, was accepted as fact and incorporated into the chronicles of numerous medieval historians, with many resulting variations on the story’s details and the name of its central knight. The fame of Station Island naturally grew in the centuries that followed, and numerous penitents and pilgrims from around Europe traveled there for absolution and holy visions. Predictably, as the site’s reputation grew, so did the number of visions of the afterlife, and the expectation for direct communication with the dead (Curtayne, pp. 30-50). In 1397 Raymond de Perelhos, a Spanish count in the court of Pope Benedict XII, traveled to the cavern on Station Island to receive information from the recently deceased King John of Aragon—and reported success in his spiritual conference, though the King would not tell why he had been consigned to Purgatory (Curtayne, pp. 44-45). Station Island had become permanently associated, in local history and European lore, with visions of the afterlife and the dead. This visionary furor seems to have lasted until 1497, when a scandal involving fraud and simony (the practice of charging fees for church offices) brought about a papal order that the small cavern be sealed. It is not clear whether this order was followed, or whether the sealed cavern was not Station Island but a “false” visionary cave on nearby Saints’ Island, where the local monastery was situated, but the sixteenth century saw a great diminishment in fantastic tales of the underworld from Station Island (Curtayne, pp. 50-55).
The island remains, however, an important holy site, though the modern pilgrim does not visit the cavern in which the Knight Owen had his vision. Modern visitors to Station Island keep a three-day fast (except for water and small portions of bread) and, while on the island, a twenty-four-hour vigil, barefoot walking, repeated circling of stone “beds” (said to be the remnants of medieval monastic cells), and repetition of vocal prayer. These are the exercises Heaney undertakes during his own pilgrimage and his literary visions of the dead.
The Poem in Focus
Plot summary
“Station Island” has Heaney traveling to St. Patrick’s Purgatory, or Station Island, in County Donegal to perform a ritual of penance. While he undertakes this pilgrimage, Heaney is visited by a number of spirits or shades of the dead, both from his personal acquaintance and from his store of literary forefathers: a boyhood schoolmaster, a cousin killed by Protestant terrorists, the poet Patrick Kavanagh, the novelist James Joyce. (The narrator clearly seems to be the poet himself, and we are to suspect that the trip to Station Island, if not the visions, was Heaney’s own.) While there is a strong tradition linking Station Island to visions of the afterlife, the poet, Heaney seems to be running against the grain of the island’s rituals: often in the moments when he sees the apparitions, he has drawn apart from the crowds of pilgrims, or faces against the direction of their procession. This seems to register both the poet’s need for spiritual contact or consolation and his doubts about the ritual motions through which he’s pacing. Though the ghosts seem at first determined to undermine the poet’s faith in both Catholicism and his writing, the poem ends with a qualified confirmation of both, sending the man-poet back from Station Island with a renewed sense of purpose.
The first of the poem’s 12 sections occurs before Heaney arrives on the island itself. Crossing a field of grain and summoned by church-bells, he is confronted by the spirit of an old neighbor, the tinker Simon Sweeney, “an old Sabbath-breaker/who has been dead for years” (Heaney, “Station Island,” Station Island, 1.19-20). Sweeney resists this simple identification, claiming to be a sort of bogeyman from Heaney’s childhood, haunting him now as then. Holding a bowsaw “like a lyre” (“Station Island,” 1.12) and curiously concerned with the hazel bushes, Simon Sweeney seems to evoke the legendary mad Irish poet-king who shares his name. As Heaney draws away from Sweeney and into the crowd called to Mass, Sweeney warns, “Stay clear of all processions!”—advice that ironically follows the poet through the pilgrimage to come (“Station Island,” 1.65).
The second section finds Heaney stumbling on another shade, this one farther from his personal acquaintance: a footnote reveals this “someone walking fast in an overcoat” to be the nineteenth-century Irish author William Carleton, whose narrative “The Lough Derg Pilgrim” (1828) describes his own pilgrimage to Station Island, on which he is adored and robbed, coming and leaving, by two old women, who at first mistake him for a young priest (“Station Island,” 2.4). Car-let on’s narrative, written after his conversion to Protestantism from Catholicism, inveighs against the “mechanical spirit” of the pilgrimage exercises, and his appearance here seems to be a second warning to the poet against the rituals of Station Island (O’Brien, pp. 57-58). Carleton’s ghost appears angry that Heaney is on his way to Lough Derg (“O holy Jesus Christ, does nothing change?” he asks [“Station Island,” 2.19]); and he challenges Heaney as a writer to match the political strife of his times (“If times were hard, I could be hard too,” [“Station Island,” 2.34]). Heaney insists instead on the virtues of local peace and harmony, calling up images of a tamer sectarian struggle—“a band of Ribbonmen play [ing] hymns to Mary” near his childhood home, “not that harp of unforgiving iron/the Fenians strung”; or simple images of farming and rustic nature (“Station Island,” 2.43-49). Carleton gets the last word, however, as he interrupts, insisting, “We are earthworms of the earth, and all that/has gone through us is what will be our trace,” a metaphor that calls for a greater poetic appetite at the same time as it belittles the entire endeavor of writing (“Station Island,” 2.67-68).
Sections 3 and 4 have Heaney recalling a young invalid girl (his father’s sister, according to Corcoran, p. 112). He also sees the shade of Terry Keenan, a missionary priest and early acquaintance of Heaney’s who later died in the tropics. Like several of his other encounters, these tread a careful line between reminiscence and vision. The girl’s treasured toy or souvenir appears to Heaney in Section 3, for example, within the frame of his memory. The souvenir carries the narrative of her sickness in its physical presence as a reliquary might hold a saint’s bones: “A seaside trinket floated then and idled/in vision, like phosphorescent weed . . ./pearls condensed from a child invalid’s breath/into a shimmering ark” (“Station Island,” 3.9-14). The apparition of Section 4 might be only a “malarial priest, home from the missions,” one of the pilgrims surrounding Heaney as he walks the island’s stations (O’Brien, p. 55); however, he is not, for he vanishes suddenly at line 56 as the section is ending. Heaney seems to have known the priest at Mossbawn, for the poet ventures, “I’m older now than you when you went away” (“Station Island,” 4.33): that is, the priest was once his senior, but now, in the purgatorial suspension of death, Heaney is the elder. Keenan has stayed one age while Heaney has grown older.
Like the ghost of Carleton, the missionary priest questions the value of Heaney’s pilgrimage, accusing him of the same easy comforts and pieties their neighbors felt in the priest’s homely presence back at Mossbawn. The priest says Heaney has made it “clear” of religious practice only to “walk into [it]/over again” (“Station Island,” 4.50-51). “What are you doing,” he asks, “going through these motions?”—and going through motions is an apt description of the barefoot circular pacing and repetitions of vocal prayer undertaken on Station Island (“Station Island,” 4.52). The priest answers his own question, suggesting that Heaney might be “taking the
SWEENEY AND ST. RONAN
Roughly contemporary with St. Patrick are the legends of Sweeney (or Suibhne), a seventh-century Ulster king who rebelled against and then was accepted by Christianity as it arrived in Ireland. Hearing the bell of St. Ronan announcing the founding of a church within his kingdom, the pagan king rushes out to do battle, as his story Buile Suibhne (Sweeney Astray) begins. He strikes St. Ronan’s bell with his spear, and flings the cleric’s richly illuminated psalter into a lake. An otter miraculously delivers the book from the lake-bottom, undamaged by its time underwater, and St. Ronan calls down a curse with the bell that had so angered Sweeney: the one-time king is transformed into a mad bird-man, who spends the rest of his days flying through Ireland and Scotland, mourning his plight and composing poetry. Through his hardships—more “purgatorial” than any endured on Station Island—Sweeney comes to accept “with saint-like grace the Christian shaping of his story, whilst living in the wild and pagan world of his exile” (Byron, pp. 46-47). Near the end of his life, Sweeney is pitied by St. Moling, who cannot restore his body or his senses, but who provides the former king with food and offers benedictions over his death.
Heaney not only translated Buile Suibhne; he also speaks, as It were, in the voice of the transformed Sweeney in the third section of the book that contains “Station Istand.” And so when the tinker Simon Sweeney is called “an old Sabbath-breaker,” particularly with the sound of church-bells ringing around him and with his eyes fixed on the hazel bushes nearby, Heaney invokes not only unshaped fears from his childhood but the mad bird-king of his recent literary work (“Station Island,” 1.19).
last look” at a religion he is giving up, and Heaney’s silence at this point implies some measure of doubt (“Station Island,” 4.55).
In Section 5, Heaney sees the ghosts of two schoolmasters (who taught him Latin and literature at Anahorish) and the shade of Patrick Kavanagh, a fellow Ulster poet Heaney has elsewhere credited with a strong influence on his work, and whose 1942 poem “Lough Derg” is one of the literary precedents or undertexts of “Station Island.” Like the other literary figures that visit Heaney, Kavanagh complains about the poet’s old-fashionedness: “Forty-two years on/and you’ve got no farther!” (“Station Island,”
ROMANTIC TERRORIST
In his essay on “Station Island,” Neil Corcoran identifies the ghost that appears to Heaney in Section 9 as Francis Hughes, a young member of the Provisional IRA who died while on a hunger strike in May 1981. A guerrilla with other Catholic factions for several years before joining the Provisional IRA in 1974, Hughes quickly developed a reputation in County Derry for effective terrorist work and for a brash, freewheeling style that had him telephoning his police opponents and walking through patrolled roadblocks. Hughes captured a certain Romantic imagination by being both a deadly gunman and a man of principles: “I don’t want to be shooting them,” he said, “But what other way do I have to protest, can you tell me? . I hate what I’m doing. I really hate it. But I’m going to keep doing it” (Hughes in Bell, pp. 538-39).
On the night before St. Patrick’s Day, 1978, Hughes was seriously wounded by return fire in an unplanned attack on a police outpost in a field near Magherà, in County Derry, not far from Heaney’s childhood home. He was captured and in a trial ten months later received a life sentence for two of the attacks of which he was suspected. In January 1981, from prison, he joined a hunger strike designed to call world attention to the troubles in Ireland. Branded as “the Bellaghy Butcher” and suspected now of over 26 deaths, he did little to draw public support for the protest, though others did. Ever a man of his convictions, Hughes died on May 12, 1981, the fifty-ninth day of his fast. He was neither the first nor the last to die in this protest, but his local fame in southeast County Derry lends him special relevance for Heaney.
5.59-60). Again, Heaney has only silence as an answer to this challenge.
Section 6 returns to a vision of Heaney’s childhood, this one more thoroughly transporting in that scenery and events return, not only the spirits of the dead. Heaney, walking against the flow of his fellow pilgrims again, stands in the shade of an oak and remembers a girl, apparently a first love, peeped at through keyholes and atoned for in the confessional, and the innocent ardor of their nicknames and whispered secrets. The section, touching especially for its presence among scenes of doubt and penitence, is made ironic only by the “parting shot” Kavanagh’s ghost has given in the preceding section: “In my own day,/the odd one came here on the hunt for women” (“Station Island,” 5.62-63). The seventh and eighth sections give voice to two recently deceased shades, a shopkeeper acquaintance (William Strathearn) and a cousin (Colum McCartney, for whom an elegy, “The Strand at Lough Beg,” appears in Heaney’s Field Work)—both murdered in the sectarian violence that haunted Heaney’s adulthood in Belfast. These two sections are among Heaney’s most direct treatments of that violence, and Section 8 in particular shows his sense of guilt, or inadequacy for his difficult times: like the earlier ghost of Carleton, McCartney’s shade accuses Heaney of evasiveness, saying that his atonement at Station Island may be—or should be—“for the way you whitewashed ugliness and drew/the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio[the second poem in Dante’s Divine Comedy, which supplies the epigraph to “The Strand at Lough Beg”]/and saccharined my death with morning dew” (“Station Island,” 8.73-75). The shopkeeper’s ghost is less accusatory, though Heaney asks him for absolution (“Forgive my timid circumspect involvement,” he asks, whereupon the shopkeeper simply brushes him off: “Forgive/my eye” [“Station Island,” 7.79-80]). In both cases, Heaney seems to want or need a forgiveness the ghosts are unable to give, and this refusal of consolation seems an important part of the penance Heaney has undertaken.
The ninth section, the dark midnight end of Heaney’s 24-hour vigil, has him visited by what seems will be the last of his ghosts, an unnamed gunman (whom Neil Corcoran identifies as Francis Hughes, an IRA hunger-striker [Corcoran, p. 114]). Within the poem, Hughes is marked as Catholic only by the “mass cards/at his shrouded feet” in his funeral service (“Station Island,” 9.16-17). Heaney participates, briefly, in the gunman’s experience, seeing what he had seen from his hayloft perch, then turns to a standard elegiac maneuver (modified by modern circumstances). He addresses the dead gunman who has just spoken to him in the dark: “Unquiet soul, they should have buried you/In the bog where you threw your first grenade,/Where only helicopters and curlews/Make their maimed music” (“Station Island,” 9.22-25). Then, as if to reject this consolation in poetry, a new vision appears, a living but non-human thing that Heaney describes as a “Strange polyp” or sea anemone, “like a huge corrupt/Magnolia bloom, surreal as a shed breast” (“Station Island,” 9.31-32). Faced with this apparition of the inhuman and unintelligible, and with its implications of violence done to human flesh, Heaney recants against his “unweaned” life of half-conscious complacency, and wakes the next morning full of self-reproach (“Station Island,” 9.35). He recognizes, however, that the reproach itself offers him no new path, no converted life: he compared himself to “someone/Drunk in the bathroom during a party,/. repelled by his own reflection,/. . . As if a stone . . . could grind itself down to a different core” (“Station Island,” 9.61-68).
The next two sections offer an unexpected consolation, in precisely the places where Heaney had previously found only discomfort: memory and poetry. In Section 10, Heaney sees at the pilgrims’ breakfast a mug or dipping cup that recalls, abruptly and exactly, a glazed earthenware cup that had been a family treasure, visible (but forgotten, perhaps, until now) throughout his childhood like a private Holy Grail. He compares this return of the unchanged, unbroken cup across the decades to the return of St. Ronan’s book of psalms, fished from the lake-bottom undamaged by an otter. Section 11 has Heaney working a sort of poetic equivalent to saying the rosary: writing a translation (presented in the poem and requested by a monk) of a poem by St. John of the Cross, the refrain of which (“although it is the night”) recalls the disturbing visions of Section 9, and in its way tames them—bringing them to the poet’s service, repeating the words until they are less frightening.
His penance done, and his pilgrimage complete, Heaney returns from the island to the lake shore in Section 12, and finds himself, unexpectedly, taking the hand of another ghost, whom he does not at first recognize. Before the ghost begins to speak, however, Heaney takes him for James Joyce, the novelist who is surely among the most prodigious figures in Ireland’s literary pantheon. Perhaps it is strange that a poet would receive his final visitation from Joyce and not from William Butler Yeats, Ireland’s major early-twentieth-century poet and a notorious spiritualist (see “September 1913” and “Easter, 1916” , also in WLAIT 4: British and Irish Literature and Its Times). However, Heaney’s connection to Joyce is immediate and powerful: the poet charges a passage in Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) with having opened his eyes to the etymological power of his local dialect. The “Feast of the Holy Tundish,” as Heaney calls it, celebrates a conflict between Joyce’s protagonist Stephen Dedalus and a Jesuit dean over the words funnel and tundish, the latter being Stephen’s familiar Dublin dialect—and, as Joyce reveals, “good old blunt English too” (Corcoran, p. 118). The etymological discovery—that tundish and, by extension, local dialect words in general are as legitimate, as close to the source, as the pedagogue’s standard vocabulary—is also, for Heaney, “a revelation/set among my stars” because, by coincidence, the date of Stephen’s diary entry (April 13) is also Heaney’s birthday (“Station Island,” 12.36-37).
The instructions Heaney gives himself in the guise of Joyce’s ghost chiefly concern striking an independent, individual voice—“it’s time to swim/out on your own,” the shade tells him (“Station Island,” 12.48-49). Although in a way this is something Heaney has been doing all along, swimming against the current of the pilgrims milling about him, the surety of Joyce’s phrasing (which combines encouragement with rebuke) makes it clear that Heaney’s pilgrimage has been of value, though not for orthodox reasons. Heaney does not comment on Joyce’s advice and admonitions, but only shows the phantom walking straight off into the rain; however, Joyce’s chief command is that Heaney keep on writing, that he place his faith there, and the rest of Heaney’s work is evidence that he has followed this command.
A poet’s social obligation
As an Ulster Catholic and a man of public stature, Heaney has been berated by some on both sides of the Northern Irish conflict for not taking a stronger political stand in his poetry—for writing chiefly about the personal and the local; the quiet rural landscapes of Mossbawn or Glanmore, instead of the pitched demonstrations that echoed around him in the Belfast of the 1970s. In his Nobel Prize address, Heaney describes this atmosphere as “a situation of ongoing political violence and public expectation, . . . not [for] poetry as such but [for] political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups” (Heaney, “The Nobel Lecture,” Opened Ground, p. 418). To write for either side, Heaney says, would have been unjust and would have made enemies of many committed friends. Remaining silent, however, was a compromise against social responsibility. In “Exposure,” one of the poems initially published in North (1975), Heaney writes that he would like to find motivation in
my friends’
Beautiful prismatic counseling
And the anvil brains of some who hate me
As I sit weighing and weighing
My responsible tristia.
(Heaney, “Exposure,” Opened Ground, p. 135)
He imagines a poetry that not only describes but transforms the world, that creates a new clarity “like the impatient thump which unexpectedly restores the picture to the television set” (Heaney, “The Nobel Lecture,” Opened Ground, p. 420). After all, poets as various as Percy Shelley and William Butler Yeats—or, for that matter, Patrick Kavanagh—had turned their verse to political purposes.
A certain measure of guilt for his compromise of non-involvement seems to haunt Heaney in “Station Island,” and, in large measure, it is for having avoided political themes that he seems to seek atonement. Faced with the visibly wounded ghost of a friend shot by Protestant thugs, Heaney surprises himself by asking, “Forgive the way I have lived indifferent—/forgive my timid, circumspect involvement” (“Station Island,” 7.77-78). Looking on this man’s injuries, Heaney feels the obligation to have spoken for him, a social responsibility for a murdered friend. However, this is not the only obligation of the poet, as Heaney apparently sees it. He writes that even in a country injured by sectarian violence, there is a tension “between two often contradictory commands: to be faithful to the collective historical experience and to be true to the recognitions of the emerging self’ (Heaney, “Envies,” p. 19). Heaney’s poems about the violence of his times, like the middle sections of “Station Island,” or parts of “Singing School” in North, are personal accounts, anecdotes, and encounters. This is the compromise for which he asks forgiveness, a forgiveness that the ghosts of William Strathearn and Colum McCartney in “Station Island” seem unwilling to grant.
However, in the poem’s final section, Heaney takes the hand of James Joyce, and finds, in the advice given by the elder writer’s shade, some measure of absolution for his own writerly guilt. Joyce first says that the pilgrimage to Station Island has been misdirected, the atonement not sufficient:
Your obligation
is not discharged by any common rite.
What you must do must be done on your own
so get back in harness. The main thing is to write
for the joy of it.
(“Station Island,” 12.17-23)
It is as clear here as at any point in “Station Island” that the reason for Heaney’s pilgrimage is a thread of doubt not in religion, which has never played a dominant role in Heaney’s writing, but in the writing itself. “Station Island” is in its way an attempt to atone for having taken craft more seriously than social and political strife. Heaney’s move from Belfast to rural, Republican Glanmore in 1972 might have been seen as a kind of flight; Joyce’s advice refigures that return to the country as a necessary step for Heaney’s poetic obligation—an obligation described in agricultural terms: like an ox or a draft-horse, Heaney must do his work “in harness” (“Station Island,” 12.22).
Joyce’s advice finishes with an invocation not of the violence that killed many of Heaney’s specters, but with the imagery of love seen in Section 6, familiar too from the many beautiful love lyrics in the rest of Heaney’s work. Joining love to field-work—both endeavors being, after all, personal as well as social—Joyce tells Heaney to
Cultivate a work-lust
that imagines its haven like your hands at night
dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.
You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.
Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest,
let others wear the sackcloth and ashes.
Let go, let fly, forget.
You’ve listened long enough. Now strike your note.
(“Station Island,” 12.23-30)
The “sackcloth and ashes” of religious penitence suggests here the earnestness of the poet of strict social responsibility. Joyce directs Heaney away from this sort of commitment, saying, “You lose more of yourself than you redeem/doing the decent thing” (“Station Island,” 12.46-47). The counsel from Joyce that ends the poem returns Heaney to his previous practice—writing personal lyrics and accounts like “Station Island” itself—but leaves him seeing this choice not as a compromise, but as brave independence, walking straight away from the social tumult: not ignoring the rumble of bomb-blasts or the clamor of political rhetoric, but (in such silence as they allow) striking one’s own note.
Sources and literary context
Heaney’s use of William Carleton as representative of the nineteenth-century writer’s “The Lough Derg Pilgrim,” or Patrick Kavanagh as representative of the modern poet’s “Lough Derg,” are discussed briefly above, but the clearest literary forebear for “Station Island” is Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which Dante encounters numerous shades of the recent dead, some of which upbraid him much as Heaney’s do. Heaney discusses this relation himself in a talk titled “Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet.” Although sections of “Station Island” approximate Dante’s verse form, what seems to have interested Heaney is not the epic’s form or structure, but its “local intensity, the vehemence and fondness attaching to individual shades” (Heaney, “Envies,” p. 18). Heaney sees in this individual or local attention an answer to, or compromise between, the competing claims of history on the one hand and the poet’s individuality on the other (Heaney, “Envies,” p. 19).
Of course, narratives of conversation with the dead occur at least as early as Homer’s Odyssey, and certain aspects of “Station Island” seem to resemble Odysseus’s travels more than Dante’s. For instance, Heaney, like Odysseus, summons his shades through ritual, not by traveling to their realm. Similarly, Heaney seems to receive the apparitions for specific reasons: warnings, admonitions, or advice. Here he seems to partake in the medieval lore and tradition surrounding St. Patrick’s Purgatory and the visions of the Knight Owen as closely as he follows Dante.
Reception
Seamus Heaney was already a major figure in poetry when Station Island appeared in 1984. The Times Literary Supplement, The New York Review of Books, The Yale Review, and The New Yorker all hailed the new collection of poems with articles of several pages, generally focusing their praise on the book’s 12-part eponymous central sequence, “Station Island.” In the Yale Review, Robert B. Shaw called it “a book of great imaginative vitality,” and one that cast Heaney’s work to date into a clear shape by “defining more keenly than ever before the unanswerable questions” that “[spur] this Irish poet into song” (Shaw, p. 581). Many also saw Station Island as a chance for Heaney to remake or reinvent his poetic persona, a tum from the short, personal lyrics of his earlier volumes to a social, even religious poetry, more involved with his times while still in vital contact with tradition: the Times Literary Supplement wrote, “As every new book by a major writer should, it gives us a rather different poet from the one we thought we knew” (Morrison, p. 1191). The critics’ early sense of the importance of “Station Island” has been confirmed, as it—along with the bog-people poems of North (1975) and, most likely, the new translation of Beowulf (2000; in WLAIT 3: British and Irish Literature and Its Times)—has become the most noted and most recognized of the works of this important late-twentieth-century poet. Heaney received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995.
—Isaac Cates
For More Information
Bell, J. Bowyer. The Irish Troubles: a Generation of Violence, 1967-1992. New York: St. Martin’s, 1993.
Byron, Catherine. Out of Step: Pursuing Seamus Heaney to Purgatory. Bristol: Loxwood Stoneleigh, 1992.
Corcoran, Neil. “Writing a Bare Wire: Station Island.” New Casebooks: Seamus Heaney. Ed. Michael Allen. New York: St. Martin’s, 1997.
Cunningham, John B. Lough Derg: Legendary Pilgrimage. Monaghan: R. & S., 1984.
Curtayne, Alice. Lough Derg: St. Patrick’s Purgatory. London: Burns Oates & Washboume, 1944.
Heaney, Seamus. “Envies and Identifications: Dante and the Modern Poet.” Irish University Review 15, no. 1 (spring 1985): 5-19.
_____. Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980.
_____. Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998.
_____. “Station Island.” In Station Island. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1985.
Morrison, Blake. “Encounters with Familiar Ghosts.” Times Literary Supplement, 19 October 1984, 1191-1192.
O’Brien, Darcy. “Piety and Modernism: Seamus Heaney’s ‘Station Island.’” James Joyce Quarterly 26, no. 1 (fall 1988): 51-65.
Shaw, Robert B. “Heaney’s Purgatory.” The Yale Review 74 (summer 1985): 581-587.
Tapscott, Stephen. “Poetry and Trouble: Seamus Heaney’s Irish Purgatorio.” Southwest Review 71 (autumn 1986): 519-535.
Vendler, Helen. Seamus Heaney. Cambridge, Mass.:Harvard University Press, 1998.