Poetry from Heaney and Boland

“She never lamented once and she never/Carried a spare ounce of emotional weight,” writes Seamus Heaney of the aunt he remembers in Field of Vision. In these two lines, Heaney could well be describing his own lean but sensitive style when it comes to writing from and about memory—an approach that his contemporary Eavan Boland also adopts in her work. In keeping with the theme of memory, this paper will analyse the poetic treatment of retrospect in Heaney’s Casualty and Boland’s Domestic Violence through a discussion and comparison of each poem’s content and form.

Heaney’s Casualty is an elegy to an unnamed friend, a poem that follows a sombre trimeter as the narrator looks back on his subject. The poem, following a tight scheme of cross-rhyming, is arranged in three parts, seemingly reflecting a traditional linear narrative of beginning, middle and end—an ironic structure, considering the poem deals with three stages of the past. Although the poem does not progress beyond the period of sectarian urban warfare in Northern Ireland in the 1970s, the tribute to the anonymous “casualty”, needlessly caught up in times of violence, is contained within Heaney’s retrospective musings.

The quiet tone of Casualty is matched by the initial description of the poet’s friend, who orders his drinks at the pub through gestures of “discreet dumb-show”. As the stanza progresses, Heaney deftly sketches his friend’s portrait: the casualty was a fisherman, a man with a rare mixture of self-deprecating but sociable qualities that causes the poet to reflect, “I loved his whole manner”. Heaney injects irony and embellishment into the poem, observing that his life as a writer was “incomprehensible” to his friend, while carrying on with his verse homage. “But my tentative art/his turned back watches too,” Heaney continues as a precursor to the colloquial and violent announcement that his friend was “blown to bits/Out drinking in a curfew”. Ignominiously, then, the living friend becomes the casualty but reaches, in his death, an omnipresent understanding of poetry and the politics behind it. Since the poet and his subject are no longer divided by their earthly pursuits, the intimacy of the tribute increases.

In the second part of the poem, Heaney strikes a distance from the intimacy of the previous stanza, with a description of “cold/Raw silence”, a bold statement of his friend’s rebellion against the constraints of curfew—he “would not be held/At home by his own crowd”— and the political situation that led to his death in a cold blinding “flash”. Heaney goes on to contrast this “flash” against the “warm lit-up” pubs that enticed his friend with their comforting “blurred mesh and murmur” and drifts of hazy air. At this point Heaney asks the only question of the poem, one that remains unanswered yet points out his friend’s deliberate political unawareness in the face of his desire to satiate his individual needs.

Heaney imagines his friend’s funeral, attended by “quiet walkers/And sideways talkers” and the “purring of the hearse”, in images that establish a fluid and civilized aftermath to the violent death. These images then merge into another memory, a recollection of Heaney and his friend in a fishing boat on the ocean, removed from the streets and the pubs and their intoxicating atmosphere. Recalling that they both “tasted freedom” during this boat trip, Heaney declares it the “proper haunt” of his friend, somewhere that matches his afterlife state of “well out, beyond…” The stanza breaks; the last three lines herald the return of Heaney’s quiet tribute as his friend is brought back down to earth and into the shadows, becoming once more a “plodder through the midnight rain”, whose company is sorely missed.

Domestic Violence by Boland is, like Casualty, divided into sections yet follows no formal rhyme scheme: instead, it is structured into quatrains of free verse. The first part describes in disjointed sentences the reminiscences that come to Boland, the reader, and the spouse she addresses throughout the poem: the “winter, lunar, wet” environment of the village befits an alien planet, at contrast with the warm, neighborly wit of the butcher, whose inclusion in the first stanza is ominous. Then, again in contrast, Boland goes on to remember the “couple who quarreled into the night…”

The feeling of unease established in the first part of the poem is consolidated in the opening of the second, as the poet continues, “In that season suddenly our island/Broke out its old sores for all to see.” Domestic Violence becomes, then, an elegy in its own way—not for a person as in Casualty, but for a time and place. For the newly-married couple in the poem, the landscape of “rivers, table mountains, Viking marshes” that make up the life they “thought [they] knew” contracts into news broadcasts on a television set that announce the “killings, killings, killings” of the Irish civil unrest. The “moonlight-colored funerals” displayed on the TV match the unreal landscape described in the first stanza—like Heaney’s dreamlike description of the funeral in Casualty, Boland also creates distance from events through imagery. The second part of the poem ends with an inversion of the last line of the first: where Boland initially focuses on what is not “right in the lives of those who love each other,” referring to the quarreling couple in the village, she now comments on what is “wrong in the lives of those who hate each other,” making parallel the domestic violence between individuals and groups, home and country.

Like the second part of the poem, which features enjambments across four stanzas to emphasize growing feelings of anxiety and fear, the third part of the poem is irregular, comprising of two quatrains that reflect on the ability of memory to hold simultaneous and contradictory images. Boland wonders at the experience of detached remembrance, asking why the memory of her “safe” kitchen, flooded with “weak spring light”, is haunted by another room, shadowy and full of fearful whispers. Boland’s poetic climax ends with a rhetorical inquiry in the same way as Heaney’s Casualty: neither the poet nor the person she is addressing can provide an answer and so the question continues to haunt her. Unlike Heaney, however, Boland clearly defines and challenges the problematic nature of memory’s role in this haunting.

The fourth part of the poem marks the return of Boland’s regularly-punctuated quatrains and is calmer in tone. Boland’s final stanza concerns itself with the anonymous arguing couple introduced in the first part of the poem: the poet declares that she knows, and always knew, who they were. The reader is thus left with the impression that Boland’s recollections throughout the poem are all internal: the quarreling couple and the violent land, the peaceful couple and their uneventful village life were all experienced by the same person. Thus, according to Boland, retrospect can divide and distort memories but is also essential to one’s true awareness of life experience.

Although they both concern recollections of the past, loss and mourning, the poems Casualty by Seamus Heaney and Domestic Violence by Eavan Boland could hardly be classed as “laments”. The very word evokes sobbing, screaming and beatings of the heart, whereas the approach of both poets is honorific, touching, modest but never severe. As discussed above, retrospect is explored by both poets with dignified, rather than extravagant, sentiment. In Casualty, Heaney plays with the idea of time and variations of light and life before he lays his friend to rest with no florid and elevated questioning of the futility of his death. Just as elegantly, Boland intersects memories of domestic life with political activity in Domestic Violence and concludes with a calm acknowledgment of their merging. Memory can haunt, teach both Heaney and Boland, but it does not have to shout; and the poems are all the more haunting and effective for not carrying a “spare ounce of emotional weight” in their evocation of memory and what remains captured within it.

Works Cited

Boland, Eavan. "Domestic Violence." Poetry Foundation, n.d. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/180326.

Heaney, Seamus. "Casualty." Poetry Foundation, n.d. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/182158#poem.

Heaney, Seamus. "Field of Vision." Fung ENG4U, n.d. https://sites.google.com/site/fungeng4u/poetry/field-of-vision---seamus-heaney.