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Literary Allusion and the Poetry of Seamus Heaney
Style, Spring, 1999 by Kerry McSweeney
The dream resembles what researchers call a "lucid dream" - a dream during which the sleeper is aware of dreaming or, in Heaney's variation, dreams of dreaming. Such dreams can possess "a special sensory clarity, expansive emotional thrill, and sense of bodily presence" (Hunt 119). These are precisely the qualities found in the poem's third spatial-temporal plane, the dream/memory of "Our first night years ago in that hotel." The consummation of their love is described in religious terms - as a marvelous actualization of the spirit in the flesh initiated by the woman. No wonder, then, that the speaker introduces this secondary dream with a gentle interrogative addressed to the wife who had previously shown shortness of temper concerning her husband's predeliction for imagining things.
But "How like you this?" is not only addressed to the poet's wife. The phrase is also a literary allusion, and once this is realized the question becomes directed as much to the reader of the poem as to its addressee. The reference is to one of the earliest and best-known love lyrics of Renaissance England, "They flee from me," written by the Tudor court poet Sir Thomas Wyatt, who (with Surrey) wrote the first love sonnets in English. In its first stanza, the speaker, whose position in the sexual politics of the court has changed, laments that while nubile women once sought him out they now avoid him. In the second stanza, he gives thanks that it had often been otherwise in the past -
once in special,
In thin array after a pleasant guise,
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall
And she me caught in her arms long and small,
Therewithal sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, "Dear heart, how like you this?"
"It was no dream: I lay broad waking," the third stanza begins. But the savoring of erotic memory abruptly changes to complaint: "all is turned [...] Into a strange fashion of forsaking" (117). In Stephen Greenblatt's paraphrase, the poet "views himself as a gentleman betrayed by a fickle mistress and asks bitterly what she deserves" (153).
The allusion to Wyatt's poem enriches Heaney's in two principal ways. First, comparison of the content of the two poems calls attention to the fulfilling aspects of married love celebrated in Heaney's sonnet, thus intensifying the positive conclusion of the sequence. Both poems contain an exceptionally sweet and memorably vivid pre-coital, erotic vignette in which the woman takes the lead (this being part of the sweetness for the male lover). But the relationship between the poems is not simply of part to part; there is also a contrasting relationship of whole to whole. Wyatt's speaker complains in isolation, while Heaney's addresses his spouse in intimate, loving tones. In Wyatt's poem nothing positive issues from the celebrated moment; there is no lasting satisfaction. In Heaney's poem, it is important to notice that the dream within the dream has three phases: the first - the "deliberate kiss" - is followed by "our separateness," the post-coital declension into two. But this is not two separatenesses; there is no "unbridgeable distance" as one critic thinks (Foster 98), but rather a shared separateness that modulates into the final phase - "The respite in our dewy dreaming faces." The secondary dream wonderfully merges with, or folds back into, the primary dream of the separateness of the runaway lovers in the wet of Donegal - with the wife now fully sharing the afterglow of her husband's dream.
