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Literary Allusion and the Poetry of Seamus Heaney
Style, Spring, 1999 by Kerry McSweeney
Another miscalculation in a Heaney lyric, also involving an allusion to an epic work, occurs in the second section of "Field Work," the title poem of his fifth collection. The circle, the poem's dominant image, is instanced in "the perfect eye of the nesting blackbird," "big-eyed cattle," a sunflower "heavy, earth-drawn, all mouth and eye," the vaccination mark on a woman's thigh, and a "moon small and far," which is figured as "a coin long gazed at//brilliant on the Pequod's mast/across Atlantic and Pacific waters" (52-55). The reference here is to Melville's Moby-Dick: Captain Ahab nails a gold doubloon to the mast of his ship as a prize for the first crewman to catch sight of the great white whale. The allusion was no doubt intended to signal a part-to-part metaphoric relationship - the vaccination mark on the wife's thigh resembles the gold doubloon on the Pequod's mast. But the comparison is so bizarre and the disproportion and dissimilarity between the evoking and the evoked text so great that it is difficult to regard this allusion as other than a rebarbative feature of a love poem celebrating the beloved as a maculate part of an inland natural world.
In other short poems, Heaney deploys literary allusions more effectively. For example, "Hailstones" (from The Haw Lantern) and the forty-fourth poem in the "Squarings" sequence (from Seeing Things) each contains an allusion to a seventeenth-century religious poet, the former to a work of Thomas Traherne, the latter to Henry Vaughan's poem "They are all gone into a world of light." In each case, the allusion provides a thematic and rhetorical counterpoint - the supernatural Christian faith of the antecedent poet versus the twentieth-century poet's lack of such faith. In the second poem, for example, instead of entrance into an everlasting celestial world, death is figured as "a caught line snapping":
the rod butt loses touch and the tip drools
And eddies swirl a dead leaf past in silence
Swifter (it seems) than the water's passage. (104)
And in an uncollected poem, "A Hank of Wool: i.m. Elizabeth Bishop," an allusion signals the shift from the literal to the figurative level. The poet first recalls a conversation with Bishop concerning knitting and then invites her to "come back in a cardigan"
so that we can imagine
the click and flash of needles,
see them like fireflies
in our tranquil recollection
of those supple mysteries,
knit one, drop one, slip one [...] (261)
The phrase "tranquil recollection," of course, alludes to a phrase in Wordsworth's famous description in the preface to Lyrical Ballads of the creative activity of mind in the composition of a poem (611).
As a kind of shorthand, these three literary allusions make for enriched implication and crispness of utterance, but they do not require intertextual comparisons. Indeed, in none of these poems is recognition of the allusion essential to the meaning or effect. In "Hailstones" and the lyric from "Squarings," the marker of the allusion itself provides a sufficient sense of the intended contrast. And in the Bishop elegy, the allusion is felicitous but also superfluous in that it is hard to imagine a reader missing the connection between the "supple mysteries" of knitting and writing poetry, even if the allusion were removed.
