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Literary Allusion and the Poetry of Seamus Heaney
Style, Spring, 1999 by Kerry McSweeney
I was so homesick I couldn't even eat
The biscuits left to sweeten my exile.
I threw them over the fence one night
In September 1951
When the lights of houses in the Lecky Road
Were amber in the fog. It was an act
Of stealth.
Then Belfast, and then Berkeley.
Here's two on's are sophisticated,
Dabbling in verses till they have become
A life [...] (63)
These lines contain no fewer than three literary allusions. The first is explicitly indicated: it invokes Patrick Kavanagh's sonnet "Epic," which ironically counterpoints "great events" to the "local row[s]" of rural Ireland. The second allusion refers to the boat-stealing episode in the first book of Wordsworth's Prelude. "It was an act/Of stealth" is an unacknowledged borrowing from the episode. The third allusion is also unidentified, but it calls sufficient attention to itself to signal that it is an allusion. It is to the passage in the third act of King Lear when Shakespeare's tragic king points out to Edgar, disguised as a madman, that "here's three on's are sophisticated" - that is, while Lear, the Fool, and Kent are altered by artifice (clothing), Edgar is "the thing itself; unaccommodated man [...] a poor, bare, forked animal" (3, 4, 100-02).
The point of the first allusion is straightforward: Kavanagh's County Monaghan compares to Heaney's County Derry - peripheral, provincial, stagnant, unimportant in the larger context. The third allusion takes up these inferences, registering the fact that the two former Ulster Catholic lads have became "sophisticated" enough to study canonical texts like King Lear at universities and are selfconscious about their cultural displacement. This pair of allusions also suggest the early, selfconsciously imitative phase of Heaney's creative development that is one of the subjects of the poem.
The Wordsworth allusion, however, differs in implication. The allusion, itself an act of stealth, calls no attention to itself. If it were missed, the passage would still be explicable (the boy was embarrassed by the family biscuits and secretly dumped them). But recognition of the allusion introduces a complexity of psychological motivation into Heaney's rejection of his family's gift. The sentence in the Prelude from which the marker is taken reads in full, "It was an act of stealth/And troubled pleasure" (1805, 389-90). The concluding oxymoron suggests both that the boy's pleasure was qualified by his sense of transgression and that part of the pleasure was owed to its being transgressive.
The mode of the opening of "The Ministry of Fear" - post-prandial reminiscence among men of letters - accommodates an abundance and variety of literary allusion. Shorter, more highly organized lyrics are another matter. Heaney's "Holding Course," from The Haw Lantern, for example, contains two allusions, both with unmistakable markers. One of them is the hinge on which the poem turns; the other is something else. I quote the poem in full:
Propellers underwater, cabins drumming, lights -
