| Seamus Heaney - His Life and Background
 Seamus Heaney is a world famous poet and he has written many famous poems including “Blackberry Picking”, “When All The Others”, "Mid-term Break” and “Digging”.
He was born in Derry in 1939 and was the eldest of nine children. He attended the local school at Anahorish until 1957 when he enrolled in Queens College, Belfast. In 1961 he took a first in English. The following year he attended St. Joseph’s College where he took a teacher’s certificate in English. He then taught English in St. Joseph’s until 1965 when he began lecturing English in Queens, got married and published “Eleven Poems” in conjunction with the Belfast Festival as well as “Death of a Naturalist” for which he earned many awards including the EC Gregory Award and the Geoffrey Faber memorial Prize. In 1969 he published his second volume of poetry called the “Door into the Darkness”. After a year as a guest lecturer in the University of California he returned to Belfast before moving to County Wicklow in 1972 where he published “Withering Out”. In 1975 he published “North” as well as beginning to teach in Carysfort College, Dublin. In 1979 he published “Field Work”. He published both “Selected Poems” and “Preoccupations: Selected Prose” in 1981. In 1984 his mother died and he published “Station Island”.
After his mother’s death Heaney wrote a number of sonnets about her including “When All The Others” and these were published in “The Haw Lantern” in 1987. Heaney’s father also died and there are also poems for his father in “Seeing Things” which was published in 1991.
Heaney’s poetry is made up of gentle rhythm and subtle rhyme. His poems all have either references to his childhood or the troubles in Northern Ireland in common.
Heaney has a natural gift when it comes to writing poetry, although some of the words he chooses are unusual there is always a hidden meaning in the word such as in "Digging”, he says
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
When he says snug as a gun Heaney is referring to the Troubles and how the influence of guns in every day life is very evident. Some critics suggest that Heaney puts too much emphasis in his work on Northern Ireland while others suggest that he doesn' t put enough.
Most of Heaney's poetry has references to his childhood even "When All The Others" which is an elegy to his Mother where he remembers back to how he used to help his mother peel potatoes "When all the others were away at mass".
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Oysters
By Seamus Heaney
Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight :
As I tasted the salty Pleiades
Orion dipped his foot into the water.
Alive and violated,
They lay on their beds of ice :
Bivalves: the split bulb
And philandering sigh of ocean.
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.
We had driven to that coast
Through flowers and limestone
And there we were, toasting friendship,
Laying down a perfect memory
In the cool of thatch and crockery.
Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,
The Romans hauled their oysters south to Rome :
I saw damp panniers disgorge
The frond-lipped, brine-stung
Glut of privilege
And was angry that my trust could not repose
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.
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Analysis Of “Oysters”
The poem “Oysters” comes from Heaney’s book “Field Work” which was published in 1979. “Oysters” is a typical Heaney poem. The poem is made of five stanzas each containing five lines. It is written in true Heaney style as the main themes are nature and Heaney's memories.
The first stanza tells us of how Heaney remembers eating oysters. He also makes a reference to Greek mythology and astrology when he describes the oysters as being “salty Pleiades”. Pleiades were the seven nymph sisters who each bore children to the God Zeus. He also says “Orion dipped his foot into the water”. Orion was also in greek mythology and he was said to be created from the hide of Zeus’s ox. Pleiades and Orion are connected with astrology and the line “my palate hung with starlight” suggests that the taste of the oysters is “out of this world”.
In the second stanza Heaney describes how the oysters look in nature as the water moves in and around them.
The third stanza contains Heaney’s memories of how he use to go to the coast and how he used to travel “through flowers and limestone” to get there.
In the fourth stanza Heaney describes how the Ancient Romans carried oysters over the Alps wrapped in ice and hay on the journey to Rome. He also describes the oysters as being a “glut of privilege”.
In the fifth stanza Heaney talks of his anger because the memories can’t stay clearly in his mind yet the taste of oysters sets his mind into a frenzy.
“Oysters” is a simple yet beautiful poem. Heaney’s gift is that he is able to describe a simple memory with such beautiful language.
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At The Wellhead
Your songs, when you sing them with your two eyes closed
as you always do, are like a local road
we've known every turn in the past
That midge-veiled, high-hedged side road where you stood
Looking and listening until a car
would come and go and leave you lonelier
Than you had been to begin with. So, sing on,
Dear shut-eyed one, dear far-voiced veteran,
Sing yourself to where the singing comes from,
Ardent and cut off like our blind neighbour
Who played the piano all day in the bedroom.
Her notes came out to us like hoisted
Ravelling off a bucket at the wellhead
Where next thing we'd be listening, hushed and awkward.
That blind-from-birth, sweet-voiced, withdrawn musician
Was like the silver vein in heavy clay
Night water glittering in the light of day
But also just our neighbour, Rosie Keenan.
She touched her checks. She let us touch her braille
In books like books wallpaper patterns came in.
Her hands were active and her eyes were full
Of open darkness and a watery shine.
She knew us by our voices. She'd say she 'saw'
Whoever and whatever. Being with her
Was intimate and helpful, like a cure
You didn't notice happening. When I read
a poem with Keenan' s well in it, she said,
'I can see the sky at the bottom of it now'.
Seamus Heaney (1939)
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