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Literary Allusion and the Poetry of Seamus Heaney
Style, Spring, 1999 by Kerry McSweeney
The second way in which the allusion enriches Heaney's poem is on the meta-level: it calls attention to the nature and status of Heaney's love poem in relation to the tradition of English love poetry. Wyatt's poem typifies the tradition in having Romantic or passionate love rather than married love as its subject. "There's doubtless something in domestic doings," as Byron puts in Don Juan (iii 8), "Which forms, in fact, true Love's antithesis":
For no one cares for matrimonial cooings,
There's nothing wrong in a connubial kiss:
Think you if Laura had been Petrarch's wife,
He would have written sonnets all his life? (109)
And Heaney's own answer to the question of whether poetry could be a product of home life was similarly negative: "I think home life kills [...] I mean home life, at its best, obliterates the necessity for any kind of poetry. Well, unless it's an unhappy home!" (O'Shea 17).
But the subject of Heaney's poem is happily married love. The poet has made a memorable love poem out of a proverbially unpromising subject. And he is so sure of his success that he calls the reader's attention to it through an allusion that is not an act of stealth but a self-assured gesture that tallies perfectly with the loving exclamation to his wife. The poem in no way depends on the allusion for its success. While nothing essential is lost if the reader doesn't catch the allusion to Wyatt's poem, much is added if he or she does. But what is added is not something external to the poem but rather a heightened awareness of what distinguishes it from antecedent poems of sexual love.
5
Literary allusion is not a simple device, and there can be no simple answers or rules of thumb given to the questions posed at the beginning of this paper. Nevertheless, I have some concluding generalizations. The first concerns the relationship between the reader's knowledge of an allusion and the allusion's effectiveness. Not all competent readers bring to the reading of poems what Seamus Heaney brings to his writing - an undergraduate degree in English literature, extensive experience as a university and college teacher of English, and experience as a critic, editor, and lecturer. In "Holding Course," the Grendel allusion is not a problem for the reader; the marker gives sufficient indication that the reference is to something primitive and violent. But MacWhirr is not a household name, and if the reader does not catch the reference to Conrad's sea captain and have some knowledge of his character and personality, the poem's last stanza will be opaque and the poem itself lacking in closure and aesthetic coherence. This situation is surely unfortunate because it restricts those who can savor "Holding Course" to the small circle of readers who know Conrad's Typhoon, or who have access to critical mediation. For this reason, I would argue that the most aesthetically successful allusions in Heaney's poems are those with inconspicuous markers embedded in the expressive or representational texture that ping rather than thud, that are comprehensible in their own right, and that allow for the simultaneous presence of complementary and interactive levels - the expressive or representational, and the reflexive and/or intertextual.
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