Heaney's Not-British Identity
Northern Irish Poet Explores Irishness in Early Poem "Traditions"
Seamus Heaney wrote not only of his identity as an Irishman, but Northern Ireland's semi-schizophrenic position as both British and Irish.
Coming of age as a poet in a time fraught with terrorism (Belfast in the late 1960s and early 1970s), Northern Irish poet Seamus Heaney wrote not of the civil violence marring the landscape of his home, but identity: not only his identity as an Irishman, but Northern Ireland’s semi-schizophrenic position as both British and Irish.
Britain’s renewed political interest in Northern Ireland in 1969 created a new problem for the province, in terms of not only political/military intrigue but also identity. While historians of the Troubles explain the clash in terms of ethnic conflict (Catholic Republicans against Protestant Loyalists), nationalists tend to characterize it as a conflict between Britain and Ireland. Heaney, a voice of Republican Ireland, explores the crisis of identity in his poem “Traditions” (Wintering Out 1972).
In “Traditions,” the Gaelic language is a “guttural muse” (1) bulled into silence by the English’s “alliterative tradition” (3). Heaney paints one half of the dialogue between Gaelic and English as silenced, grown “vestigial, forgotten / like the coccyx / or a Brigid’s Cross / yellowing in some outhouse” (5-8).
The cross, made of rushes, were once very common in Irish homes. Since the crosses are traditionally made of rushes, new ones were made every February 1st . They are fragile, but were continually remade in order to stave off disaster. This practice had largely fallen out of use by the late twentieth century, so Heaney’s yellowing cross becomes a metaphor for lost Irish culture as “custom, that ‘most / sovereign mistress’ / beds us down into / the British Isles” (9-12).
Ironically, writing in 1974, critic John Wilson Foster proclaims that Heaney’s strengths “place him in seriousness and maturity beyond hailing distance of most younger British poets” (25). For Heaney, a backhanded compliment. He has always been, on some occasions subtly and on others emphatically (“An Open Letter”), self-proclaimed not only as Irish, but as Not British.
The final section of the poem refers to two Irish characters in other literature: a minor character used for comic relief in Shakespeare’s Henry V and a major character in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
Shakespeare’s MacMorris is a fool (3.2). His characterization and accent demonstrate a prejudice against the Irish: “Of my nation! What ish my nation? Ish a villain, and a bastard, and a knave, and a rascal. What ish my nation? Who talks of my nation?” (3.2.1251-53). He is, as all Irishmen apparently were, “going very bare / of learning, as wild hares” (29-30).
The final stanza of the poem widens the possibility of citizenhood for the Irish; the character Leopold Bloom, wandering through Dublin, is Jewish and treated as an outsider. Heaney chooses a character who falls outside the traditional notions of Irish: Catholic or Protestant, republican or loyalist, IRA or United Ulstermen. To a fiercely nationalist anti-Semite: “‘Ireland,’ said Bloom, / ‘I was born here. Ireland’ ” (35-36). Heaney does not specify what sort of Ireland he wants — Catholic or Protestant, united or divided — he is simply after an Ireland that is Irish, whatever that might mean.
The poem is ambivalent — in the first two sections Heaney laments what was, but the third section shows he is not quite sure what “Irish” means anymore. He only gets so far as Not British — though not particularly pleased with MacMorris’s drunken-sounding question, he asks the same thing: “What ish my nation?” (32).
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