Seamus Heaney and the Classics

Professor John Dillon of Trinity College Dublin paid the highest compliment to Heaney as a poet when he said that he had the ability to take the lifeblood of the ancient classics and make it flow in the veins of modern poetry; to the enrichment of both genres.[1] While Heaney's early poetry tended to be embedded in the soil, the classics played a huge role in his literary makeup. He regularly applied classical references to link the local to the wider world, comparing the family water pump in his home place, Mossbawn, to the 'omphalos' stone of Delphi that marked the sacred centre of the ancient Greek world; or comparing his cattle-dealing father to the Greek god, Hermes, the patron of traders and merchants.[2]

Heaney believed that drama offered him greater artistic freedom than poetry. In his adaptations of Sophocles' Philoctetes and Antigone, and Virgil’s Aeneid: Book VI, Heaney focused his attention on concepts around ethical dilemmas and human flaws, and the fractious nature of contemporary politics in Ireland and across the globe. In his treatment of the classics, Heaney believed that the ancients had much to offer, as conscience needs coordinates’ when it came to ‘locating ourselves in cultural and geographical space’.[3]

Heaney’s work is deeply indebted to the literary and cultural legacies of Ancient Greece and Rome. Heaney’s adaptions of Sophocles’ and Virgil’s works enabled him to make sense of his own identity, and the contemporary world of Ireland and beyond: Stephen Harrison argues that Heaney’s literary translations can be viewed ‘as sites for warning about the present and looking to the possibility of a different future’.[4] The Cure at Troy was a metaphor for Ireland’s past and present, a wound that had festered for too long which had hindered the peace process. Neoptolemus 's struggle to retain his loyalty toward the Greeks cause, while maintaining his integrity held a special allure for Heaney. Meanwhile, Philoctetes’ bitterness and rage symbolised the dilemma that many Catholics and Protestants experienced during the Troubles.[5]

To produce something that had a sense of meaning to the Troubles, Heaney felt compelled to grant a lyrical voice to the victims on both sides of the divide: Internment-without-trial, the ‘hunger-striker’s father’, a son who died in protest while imprisoned by the Unionist establishment; the ‘police widow’ mourns her murdered husband for being a representative of the Unionist regime. The penultimate chorus contains perhaps the poet’s most oft-quoted words.

‘History says, don’t hope

On this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

The longed-for tidal wave

Of justice can rise up,

And hope and history rhyme.’

Heaney sought to foster a sense of ‘healing and reconciliation at the end of the Cure at Troy, but having watched a live performance, he admitted feeling despondent in the way it spoke to an Irish audience.[6] His next play, Burial at Thebes, Heaney vowed to pay his respect to Sophocles by sticking closely to the original text. But contemporary political events were never far away. While The Cure at Troy is filled with optimism and hope for gradual peace, Heaney’s version of Antigone: The burial at Thebes reflects a more poignant view of politics past and present.[7] One of Sophocles most celebrated heroines, Antigone, pays the ultimate price for burying her brother Polyneices, against the wishes of King Creon of Thebes. Despite dire warnings from a prophet, Creon refuses to relent until it is too late. Meanwhile, Antigone is herself buried alive in a rock mound cave and later hangs herself out of grief for her slain brother. Haemon, Antigone’s lover, and son to Creon, is overcome with grief, that he decides to join her in the land of the dead. This tragic event would subsequently claim another victim, Creon’s wife, and mother to Haemon, who also chooses to end her life.

Antigone’s claims that she was acting under the natural laws bestowed by the gods is what intrigued Heaney to the play.[8]  Lucy Pitman-Wallace, who staged Heaney’s version of The Burial at Thebes in 2005, says Heaney saw a moral balance between Creon and Antigone as a ‘double tragedy, as both are equally misguided in their beliefs’.[9] 

While Heaney sought to stick tightly to the original text, he felt a balance had to be struck in making contemporary references to geo-politics, to satisfy the publicity machine which theatre requires.[10]  When he was approached by the Abbey Theatre to produce a play, the attack on the Twin Towers on 9/11 saw the rise of militant nationalism in the United States of America. Heaney drew parallels between Creon and Antigone’s intransigence with President Bush’s belligerence to ignore U.N. protocols to invade Iraq.

In Aeneid: Book VI, Virgil’s underworld was continuously present throughout Heaney’s poems.[11] The underworld of Virgil’s The Aeneid offers a sense of hope, and the subsequent birth of the Roman Empire. In his version, Heaney discovers a sense of re-birth and renewal with the birth of his grandchildren.[12]  Heaney said that his father’s death in October 1986 was the ‘final unroofing of the world and I’m certain it affected me in ways that were hidden from me then and now’.[13] Catherine Heaney called it a ‘touchstone’ to which her father returned time and again, referencing, quoting, and translating it throughout his life.[14]

Sources:

[1] Marianne McDonald, ‘Seamus Heaney’s ‘Cure at Troy’: politics and poetry in Classics Ireland, iii (1996), pp 129-40.

[2] Oliver Taplin, ‘’Boustrophedon between Helles and Rome’, in Seamus Heaney and the Classics (eds), Stephen Harrison, Fiona Macintosh and Helen Eastman (Oxford, 2019), pp 14-5.

[3] Seamus Heaney on Antigone, talk for the Abbey Theatre, 2008 Abbey Talks: Seamus Heaney discusses The Burial at Thebes, 2008

[4] Stephen Harrison, ‘Heaney as translator: Horace and Virgil’, in Seamus Heaney and the Classics (eds), Stephen Harrison, Fiona Macintosh and Helen Eastman (Oxford, 2019), p.274.

[5] MS draft of an introductory note on Sophocles’ play Philoctetes, N.L.L. MS 49,493/234; Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping stones (Dublin, 2009), pp 420-2.

[6] Srila Nayak, ‘On the far side of revenge: The plays of Seamus Heaney: no flinching at fate’, in Irish Pages, viii (2014) p.121.

[7] Marianne McDonald, ‘Seamus Heaney: an Irish poet mines the classics’, in Seamus Heaney and the Classics (eds), Stephen Harrison, Fiona Macintosh and Helen Eastman (Oxford, 2019), p.140.

[8] Marianne McDonald, ‘Seamus Heaney: an Irish poet mines the classics’, in Seamus Heaney and the Classics (eds), Stephen Harrison, Fiona Macintosh and Helen Eastman (Oxford, 2019), p.130.

[9] Stephen Harrison, Fiona Macintosh, ‘Introduction’, in Seamus Heaney and the Classics (eds), Stephen Harrison, Fiona Macintosh and Helen Eastman (Oxford, 2019).

[10] Seamus Heaney, Antigone: The burial of Thebes (London, 2004), p.15.

[11] Rachel Falconer, ‘Heaney and Virgil’s Underworld journey’, in Seamus Heaney and the Classics (eds), Stephen Harrison, Fiona Macintosh and Helen Eastman (Oxford, 2019), p.185.

[12] Peter McDonald, ‘Weird brightness and riverbank: Seamus Heaney, Virgil, and the need for translation’, in Seamus Heaney and the Classics (eds), Stephen Harrison, Fiona Macintosh and Helen Eastman (Oxford, 2019), p.173.

[13] Dennis O’Driscoll, Stepping Stones (Dublin, 2009), p.322.

[14] Aeneid: Book VI, Virgil, trans by Seamus Heaney (London, 2016), pp 52-3.