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Literary Allusion and the Poetry of Seamus Heaney
Style, Spring, 1999 by Kerry McSweeney
Covenants of flesh; our separateness;
The respite in our dewy dreaming faces. (42)
There are three loci in the poem. In present time the poet is telling his wife that presumably on the previous night "I dreamt." The place is Glanmore, County Wicklow, in the Republic of Ireland, where Heaney and his wife lived for four years after moving in 1972 from Ulster and its sectarian strife. In the present-time setting of the preceding sonnets, a central theme is hope for personal and creative renewal through closeness to the natural world. "Now the good life could be to cross a field," the poet reflects in the opening sonnet (33); and in a later sonnet he finds a vista both "marvellous/And actual" (39). In this setting, "art [could be] a paradigm of earth new from the lathe/Of ploughs [...] Each verse returning like the plough turned round" (34). The Latin word versus, as Heaney has explained elsewhere, means both a line of poetry and the turn that a plough makes at the end of a furrow (Preoccupations 65).
But there are two complicating factors in the sequence: the Troubles in Ulster, of which one is reminded by a number of minatory images, and married life. Heaney has spoken of the mutual sense of renewal and re-dedication in his marriage that resulted from the move to Glanmore as well as the couple's sense of being alone - of their being "babes in the wood" ("Stepping Stones"). But the sequence contains suggestions of a certain tension in the marital relationship caused by the poet's creative preoccupations - as in "An Afterwards," a poem from the same part of Field Work, in which the wife addresses strong words to her husband. In the "Glanmore Sonnets," something of the same tone is heard on the two occasions when the wife speaks: in the third sonnet she responds with a deflationary remark to his comparison of them to William and Dorothy Wordsworth at Dove Cottage and in the ninth, when she urges him to go outside and deal with the rat she has seen, ironically (or perhaps sardonically) adding that "I'm not/Imagining things." The implications of the remark are not lost on the spouse; at the end of the sonnet, he abruptly asks himself, "What is my apology for poetry?" (41).
The second locus in sonnet 10 results from a dream translation of the couple from Wicklow to a moss (a bog) in Donegal in the northwest of Ireland. It is the final registration in the sequence of the pressure of the Ulster past on the Wicklow present. The Heaneys' move from Northern Ireland has made them feel like runaway lovers - like Lorenzo and Jessica in The Merchant of Venice or Diarmuid and Grainne (Grania) of Celtic legend, who are pictured in Yeats's "A Faery Song" sleeping their "bridal sleep" outdoors in "the long dew-dripping hours of the night" (28). The funereal imagery describing the sleeping lovers, the sprinkling of the coffin with holy water and its incensation, are part of the Roman Catholic burial service. But the tenth sonnet is ultimately life- and love-affirming in a way that epitomizes the movement of the entire sequence.
