Jarrod Neff
Irish 226
Rickard
6 May 2005
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“Dreaming Umber”: The Search for Artistic Freedom
in Seamus Heaney’s Field Work
Ireland is a nation in possession of a rich and complex history; unfortunately, it is
a nation that has been both nurtured by the ancient traditions of its people and ravaged by
the political strife that has resulted from the conflict of many of these same customs.
Hostilities between the North and South, Unionist and Nationalist, and Protestant and
Catholic communities have been a part of Irish life for centuries. Consequently, the
search for a unified national identity has both frustrated and inspired the Irish populace.
Of these people, artists and writers in particular have often attempted to explore and
define a concept of “Irishness.” Dramatists and poets like J.M. Synge, Lady Gregory, and
especially W.B. Yeats generated a body of work that is widely regarded as the foundation
of the modern Irish literary canon. In their works, these writers experimented with many
of the prominent symbols of the culture to create a literary consciousness that was fueled
largely by the country’s fractured political status. Yeats, Synge, and Gregory’s focus
upon subjects like the contrast between the lives of Irish peasantry and nobility and the
conflict between the native Irish and the encroaching English invested the writers’ works
with urgency and honesty that are still felt today. They wrote of a nation struggling for
independence and, in the process, undergoing the pains and progress of revolution.
The modern Irish poet faces a dilemma even more pronounced than that
confronted by artists like Yeats in the early 20th century. Modern Irish poets like Seamus
Heaney must fashion a cohesive national identity in a land divided upon itself. In his
essay “Down to the center: Seamus Heaney and his place,” Lionel Basney underscores
this difference between the foundations and the present state of modern Irish poetry,
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noting that “…Yeats stood between England and Ireland, while Heaney stands between
two impulses in Ireland itself, violence and humaneness, attachment and detachment” (5).
Yeats’ Ireland consisted of a “Self” and “Other” defined largely by the divisions between
two separate nations: Ireland and England.
Heaney, however, must contend with the
aftermath of Yeats’ “terrible beauty”: an Irish national spirit that began with politicallycharged independence but fell into violent civil war. How is a poet who, like Yeats, has
involuntarily been identified as a voice of Ireland, able to draw upon the inspiration of the
land and its history when it is these same elements that gave rise to political turmoil in
the first place? Lesser poets would falter in this momentous task but Heaney, through a
deliberate shift in poetic content, escapes this intellectual barrier. Through a careful
withdrawal from the nation’s impersonal, politically-charged consciousness into the
realm of the individual, and finally into his own mind, Heaney is able to retain the
integrity of his poetry’s “Irishness” while remaining free from the political confines of
Ireland itself.
It is in North, published in 1975, that the metamorphosis of Heaney’s national
voice begins. In much of the collection, Heaney confronts the darkest aspects of the
politically-charged violence, but he does so with a noticeable distance. In “bog poems”
like “The Tollund Man” and “Punishment,” Heaney draws upon connections between his
Ireland and ancient Ireland to portray the violence as tribal tradition, but he is reluctant to
criticize the brutality of either. In The Poetry of Seamus Heaney, Elmer Andrews
explains the premise behind “Punishment”: “In ‘Punishment’ the girl hanged and dumped
in the bog for adultery is linked…with modern-day transgressors of the tribal code –
Catholic girls who were tarred and feathered for fraternizing with British soldiers” (90).
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Heaney summons the mysterious and mythic violence of Ireland’s pagan past to inform a
similar modern act. As the poem begins, the speaker identifies with the ancient victim,
saying that he “can feel the tug / of the halter at the nape / of her neck…” (1-3).
Both speaker and subject are victims, and one might expect the poem to develop into an
aggressive rebuking of the people who would commit such a despicable act; instead, the
speaker retreats from the sympathetic perspective established at the beginning of the
poem and offers an honest, ashamed admittance: “I almost love you / but would have
cast, I know, / the stones of silence” (29-31). As the poem closes, the speaker withdraws
even further from the perspective of the victim, expressing instead an understanding of
the reasons behind this punishment: “I who have stood dumb… / who would connive in
civilized outrage / yet understand the exact / and tribal, intimate revenge” (37-44).
Although the speaker may “connive in civilized outrage” over the girl’s punishment, he
admits to an understanding of the reasons behind it. He does not condone the violence,
but neither does he criticize it. Instead he investigates it purely as an act of tribe against
tribe and finds the present act in accordance with past tradition. The girl’s punishment is
impersonal and intended to serve as a warning to the rest of the community.
The ritualistic origin behind the death of the ancient bog girl is utilized to explain
the ritual significance of the modern punishment: the personal suffering for the greater
good of the communal. Maurice Harmon comments on the ritual aspect present in
“Punishment” and the rest of the collection:
The metaphor of ceremony permeates North, a collection deeply concerned with
the violence of Northern Ireland. The poems do not confront that violence. They
do not speak of individual pain or individual outrage. Instead Heaney adopts a
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communal response. Whatever personal feelings he has about death and suffering
are deflected into large, ceremonial gestures. (qtd. in Murphy 56)
This impersonal stance is reflective of the nature of the violence itself: perpetrated not for
its effect on the victim but in order to exert political influence over the community.
Heaney attempts to understand the violence at its most basic level but
intentionally retreats from a judgment of it. It is this unwillingness to prescribe a moral
judgment that has provoked some of the harshest criticisms of the work. Ciaran Carson,
one of Heaney’s renowned contemporaries, said of the poems of North:
It is as if he is saying, suffering like this is natural; these things have always
happened…and that is sufficient ground for understanding and absolution. It is as
if there never were and never will be any political consequences of such acts.
(qtd. in Foley 8)
Critics like Carson object to Heaney’s amoral and impersonal treatment of Catholic
violence and look for a resolute and critical voice, but it is evident that this is exactly
what Heaney was trying to avoid in North. In approaching the violence from a
communal perspective, grounded in myth and ancient tribal traditions, Heaney sought to
present Ireland’s violence as apolitical: a disease of human nature rather than religious or
ideological underpinnings. The poems of North, however brilliant from an artistic
perspective, were flawed because they purposely ignored the innate political character
that subjects such as tribal violence and mythic history have in the context of Irish
identity. In order to remain true to his origins as a poet of Ireland, Heaney would need to
find a way to confront politics without letting them overshadow his artistic integrity.
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In Field Work, Heaney leaves the community-centered perspectives of North—
much as he did, literally, in moving southward to County Wicklow in August of 1972—
to examine the personal side of Ireland’s tribal violence. It is clear from the beginning of
the collection, in “Oysters”, that the poetry of Field Work is aware of its struggle to
diverge from the political foreground of North: “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” (6-10). The speaker describes the oysters with the
language of suffering; they are “violated”, “split”, “ripped”, “shucked”, and “scattered”.
“Oysters”, unlike “Punishment”, immediately presents a tone of regret for the victims of
senseless violence. As the poem ends, however, the speaker’s anger is redirected into
frustration at his inability to escape social consciousness; he is “…angry that [his] trust
could not repose / In the clear light, like poetry or freedom / Leaning in from sea…” (2123). He feels burdened by the political implications of language. What began as an
attempt to describe the simple act of eating has inescapably become invested with
political sentiment. The speaker’s desire to “…repose / In the clear light, like poetry or
freedom…” is ironic because it is the unrelenting political implications of poetry that
have caused his frustration. He senses his unintentional entrance into the political realm
and yearns for an escape: “…I ate the day / Deliberately, that its tang / Might quicken me
all into verb, pure verb” (23-25). He embraces the act of eating in the hopes that this
natural operation will bring him freedom like that which he believes should be granted by
poetry or “pure verb”, but this is ultimately a false hope. As George Cusack explains in
“A Cold Eye Cast Inward: Seamus Heaney’s Field Work”, “The speaker may try to turn
away from [the language’s] political implication, but once the sentiment has been
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expressed, it cannot simply be erased. Thus, despite the speaker’s confidence, poem and
poet close in ambivalence” (2). As the opening poem of Field Work, “Oysters” is
Heaney’s recognition that his words, no matter how apolitical in intention, will be
invested with the political spirit of the land that inspires them. In the rest of the
collection, Heaney resolves to confront this dilemma rather than retreat from it.
“The Strand at Lough Beg” addresses the personal consequences of Ireland’s
sectarian conflict. As an elegy for Heaney’s cousin Colum McCartney who “was the
victim of a random sectarian killing in the late summer of 1975” (qtd. in Cusack 3), the
poem is an intimate portrayal of the violence that wracks the country, and a far different
approach than the impersonal nature of the North poems that came before it. In the first
stanza, the speaker describes the elegized’s journey into Lough Beg, a land that is
innately Irish, but ultimately foreign and dangerous: “…in your driving mirror, tailing
headlights / That pulled out suddenly and flagged you down / Where you weren’t known
and far from what you knew: / The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg,” (12-16).
Even in his own country, the elegized is made to feel like an outsider. This trend
is continued in the speaker’s reference to the “…old language of conspirators” spoken by
“…you and yours and yours and mine…” Their knowledge of the Irish language marks
them as Nationalists and Catholics and, ironically, their use of the Irish tongue also
makes them foreigners in this area of Ireland. The poem becomes heavily invested with
political weight, and when the speaker finds his cousin “With blood and roadside muck in
[his] hair and eyes,” (37) one anticipates an outcry or an emotional response to the
murder. Instead, the speaker attempts to avoid the pain and ramifications of his cousin’s
death by reuniting him with the earth: “…I dab you clean with moss… / With rushes that
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shoot green again, I plait / Green scapulars to wear over your shroud” (40-44). With his
cousin victimized by irrational violence, the speaker intends to consecrate a portion of the
land so that it will finally be free from the civil war that has plagued it for decades;
however, the event has already been invested with political significance. The speaker’s
attempt to escape political implications fails because the act has become one of Catholic
defiance in the face of Protestant violence. As George Cusack explains:
By creating an uncontestable territory with his cousin’s body, he is not escaping
sectarian conflict altogether; he is declaring a victory for his tribe by claiming a
part of the landscape into which the Protestant invaders cannot encroach. In this
sense, the repetition of “green” in the last two lines is a symbol of Republicanism
as well as of new life. (5)
The method the speaker uses to depoliticize his cousin’s murder instead identifies his
body with the earliest origins of the violence that caused his death: the dispute over land.
The elegized is Catholic and a speaker of the Irish language and in death he wears green,
the color of his heritage and the flag of his tribe. Heaney has retreated from the
withdrawn, mythic portrayal of the Irish conflict as presented in North, but his attention
to the personal, human side of the violence leaves him with little room to avoid political
ramifications. The elegized has too intimate a connection with the national strife and the
poet’s own emotions to exist as a politically neutral entity, and instead he becomes a
symbol of Catholic resistance.
“Casualty”, another elegy for a victim of violence, also serves to define Heaney’s
ambivalence toward the separation of personal and political. The poem elegizes a
Catholic fisherman killed in an IRA bombing. It deliberately investigates the private
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aspect of a public act of violence and gives a face to a formerly faceless victim. Unlike
the victim in “The Strand at Lough Beg”, the elegized in “Casualty” is a mere
acquaintance with no personal ties to the poet. In this manner, “Casualty” bears more
resemblance to “Punishment”; both victims are relatively unknown to the speaker and
both meet their fate at the hands of a public, tribal violence in which the speaker does not
intervene. Unlike “Punishment”, however, the speaker finds himself identifying with the
deceased, and in so doing he transforms the impersonal into the personal and the personal
into the political, ultimately entrenching himself back within the tribal conflict he
consistently attempts to avoid.
Even the distinctions between the definitions of the titles of “Casualty” and
“Punishment” carry political weight. The Oxford English Dictionary defines punishment
as “the infliction of a penalty in retribution for an offense”, or “Pain, deprivation, or other
unpleasant consequence imposed on or experienced by an organism responding
incorrectly under specific conditions so that, through avoidance, the desired learning or
behaviour becomes established” (OED). The first definition denotes a deserved quality
to the act, a “retribution for an offense” against the community in the case of the
betraying women. The second definition refers to the psychological form of punishment,
a form that also informs the communal perspective of the poem. The punishment is
inflicted to convince the woman to cease her involvement with the British soldier and
also to prevent other women in the community from attempting the same undesirable
behavior. Either definition carries an implied message that the speaker is yielding to the
machinations of law rather than morality and that the act of violence somehow makes
sense, the first precarious step to condoning the act. “Casualty” carries a far different
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meaning as it is defined: “a fatal or serious accident or event…Used of the losses
sustained by men in the field or on service, by death, desertion” (OED). The implication
of a loss sustained in war has undeniable political consequence in the context of the poem
and of Ireland.
In the poem itself, Heaney transforms the public casualty into a personal loss by
cataloguing the daily routine and mannerisms of the man to create a more intimate
portrayal: “He would drink by himself / And raise a weathered thumb / Towards the high
shelf, / Calling another rum / And blackcurrant, without / Having to raise his voice, / Or
order a quick stout / By a lifting of the eyes” (1-8). The speaker recalls the man as
having a “turned, observant back”, an image of purposefully disguised social awareness.
The man’s intentional avoidance of the events in his community is something the speaker
can identify with. He wishes to be unaware but understands that ultimately, social
awareness is necessary for survival in his environment.
The man’s death is foreshadowed as the speaker recalls conversations in which
the two attempted to stray from politics but were ultimately unsuccessful: “We would be
on our own / And, always politic / And shy of condescension, / I would manage by some
trick / To switch the talk to eels / Or lore of the horse and cart / Or the Provisionals” (2935). As the poet discovered in “Oysters”, any act can quickly become laden with
political consequences, whether intentional or not. Like the poet, the man continues to do
what comes “Nightly, naturally” to him without regard for the political character that
someone else might assign to his behavior. Unfortunately, as George Cusack explains,
the fisherman realizes too late that “…even actions without political motives can have
political repercussions, and so the central question of the poem becomes one of tribal
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loyalty: ‘How culpable was he / That last night when he broke / our tribe’s complicity?”
(6). Heaney revisits the dilemma posed in “Punishment” where he had to choose
between the decisions of a larger community and the rights of an individual. In
“Casualty”, however, he no longer comprehends ‘the exact / and tribal, intimate revenge’.
Instead, he questions his attitudes toward the motivations of the tribal violence.
Unlike the victim in “The Strand at Lough Beg”, the fisherman is an apolitical
casualty of non-sectarian violence. He was killed by his own “tribe” for doing what came
naturally to him, a fact that the speaker of the poem vividly acknowledges as he realizes
how closely tied his own life is to that of the elegized and how easily their fates could
have been intertwined. As Cusack asserts, the speaker finds that regardless of one’s
intentions, “…in the very real world of the ‘Troubles,’ a ‘turned, observant back’ can
quickly get one killed” (6). After withdrawing from the impersonal, violent realm of
tribal politics after North and investigating the personal element of the national conflict in
Field Work, the poet realizes that one’s actions in a land divided by sectarian conflict,
whether personal or public in nature, carry political ramifications—denying this can be
deadly. He is forced to make a decision; he must actively confront the politics of his
environment or he must leave it altogether. But how is Heaney, a poet of Ireland who
writes of the land and its people, to withdraw from that which inspires him and still retain
his art?
The eponymous “Field Work” is significant in its response to this dilemma.
Unwilling to exist as an artist in the public realm, Heaney withdraws into the freedom of
his consciousness, the realm of the poet’s mind. The speaker of the poem begins with a
retreat into a vivid, pastoral memory: “Where the sally tree went pale in every breeze, /
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where the perfect eye of the nesting blackbird watched, / where one fern was always
green / I was standing watching you” (1-4). The speaker returns to the personal as he has
done throughout Field Work. As George Cusack notes, the poet desires “…to break
through the barrier of history and connect the poetic imagination with a real-world
subject” (9). The first section of the poem ends by recalling a scene of historical progress
that converges with an impending certainty of violence: “I could see the vaccination mark
/ stretched on your upper arm, and smell the coal smell / of the train that comes between
us, a slow goods, / wagon after wagon full of big-eyed cattle” (7-10). Social revolution is
symbolized in the vaccination mark and the embarking train, but the cattle, unaware that
they will be slaughtered in the fulfillment of this progression, lend a violent undertone to
the scene. Like the speaker in “Casualty”, the speaker in “Field Work” recognizes that
violence is an inevitable fact of life in a socially strained land. Even in the retreat to his
memory, the speaker finds that politics invades thought and compromises art.
The speaker resolves to transcend this fate by searching for a new poetic symbol.
He catalogues possibilities from nature and decides that it is “Not the mud slick, / not the
black weedy water… / Not even the tart green shade of summer” (21-27). The poet must
find a symbol that enables a connection with the land without betraying it to political
influence: “No. But in a still corner, / braced to its pebble-dashed wall, / heavy, earthdrawn, all mouth and eye, / the sunflower, dreaming umber” (30-33). The sunflower is
associated with nature and the land, a place that Heaney, throughout North and the rest of
Field Work, recognizes to be inseparable from the politics of Ireland. He notes this in the
description of the sunflower “braced to its pebble-dashed wall”, an image that conjures
the bullet-scarred walls of the city. Like the poet, the sunflower is inseparable from the
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land and constrained by socially-erected walls, but it is also “dreaming umber”. Elmer
Andrews observes the complexity behind this phrase: “Since ‘umber’ could be the object
of ‘dreaming’ or ‘dreaming umber’ could be an appositional phrase further defining
‘sunflower’, Heaney achieves an effective double-meaning: the sunflower is what it
dreams about…” (144). Linguistically, the poem presents the sunflower as circular and
self-creating, but the nature of the flower itself adds further emphasis to this point: the
sunflower, drawing strength from the earth, is also nourishing and returning to it. Unlike
the speaker’s failed attempt to depoliticize the victim’s connection with the land in “The
Strand at Lough Beg”, the sunflower exists in a state created out of its own agency, not of
the consequence of imposing political forces. Its existence is in a state of constant ebb
and flow with the land; if the flower is “dreaming umber” it is giving birth to the very
land that in turn nourishes it. This is the sort of existence that the poet has been searching
for throughout Field Work: the ability to forge a realm in which one can draw upon
artistic inspirations without being overwhelmed by political entrapments. The poet, like
the sunflower, must extract artistic nourishment from the freedom of his imagination.
Having finally discovered a new artistic freedom in his own consciousness, the
speaker returns to his lover to share his newfound gift. Instead of confronting personal
tragedy as he has throughout Field Work, Heaney returns to the intimate with a sense of
exultation: “I anoint the anointed / leaf-shape. Mould / blooms and pigments / the back
of your hand / like a birthmark— / my umber one, / you are stained, stained / to
perfection“ (46-53). The speaker replaces the scar of his lover’s vaccination mark, the
mark of politically-laden progress, with the mark of the self-creating earth. The lover, his
“umber one”, is gifted with the agency symbolized in the sunflower, the other “umber
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one”. Through this movement, the poet bestows his discovery on the lover and ultimately
the reader.
Field Work is Heaney’s response to the criticisms levied on his politically
withdrawn voice in North. He resolves to withdraw to his imagination, a realm that is
inherently personal and infused with the life that surrounds him but freed from the
political constraints of the greater society. His withdrawal allows him to retain his
identity as a nationally-resounding Irish voice; he is able to address the same issues of
violence, nature, and humanity that have always characterized his work, but he does so
without the imposition of a social authority. In the limitless realm of his imagination, art
is governed by his own rules, and the poetry can finally exist without politics. Art can be
used to reflect politics and to make meaning out of tragedy, but it is art alone that exists
as solace from these pains and pressures. Like the blessing bestowed upon his lover in
“Field Work”, Heaney offers this wisdom to the reader and to Ireland. Perhaps this is
why Heaney persevered for so long in search of poetry free from politics; he sought most
of all not to reflect his people’s pain back onto them, but to finally free them from it.
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Works Cited
Andrews, Elmer. The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: All the Realms of Whisper. New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1988.
Basney, Lionel. “Down to the center: Seamus Heaney and his place.” The Christian
Century 113 (1996).
Cusack, George. “A Cold Eye Cast Inward: Seamus Heaney’s Field Work.” New
Hibernia Review 6 (2002).
Foley, Andrew. “’Befitting emblems of adversity’: The bog poems of Seamus Heaney.”
English Studies in Africa: a journal of the humanities 41 (1998).
Heaney, Seamus. Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996. New York: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 1998.
Murphy, Andrew. Seamus Heaney. 2nd ed. United Kingdom: Northcote House Ltd,
2000.
Oxford English Dictionary. 2005. Oxford University Press. <http://dictionary.oed.com>
“Casualty”. Def. 2a and 2b. 1 May 2005
“Punishment”. Def. 1a and 1b. 1 May 2005