Below are Christmas gifts from Seamus Heaney and his avid readers, Kerrin Sheldon and Elaine McMillion Sheldon.
I "One Christmas Day in the Morning"
Tommy Evans must be sixty now as well. The last time I saw him was at
the height of the Troubles, in Phil McKeever's pub in Castledawson, the
first time we'd met since Anahorish School. I felt as free as a bird, a
Catholic at large in Tommy's airspace.
Yet something small prevailed. My father balked at a word like 'Catholic'
being used in company. Phil asked if we were OK. Tommy's crowd
fenced him with 'What are you having, Tommy?'
I was blabbing on about guns, how they weren't a Catholic thing, how the
sight of the one in his house had always scared me, how our very toys at
Christmas proved my point -- when his eye upon me narrowed.
I remembered his air-gun broken over his forearm, my envy of the
polished hardwood stock, him thumbing the pellets into their aperture.
The snick of the thing then as he clipped it shut and danced with his eye
on the sights through a quick-quick angle of ninety degrees and back,
then drilled the pair of us left-right to the back of the house.
The Evans' chicken coop was the shape of a sentry-box, walls and gable
of weathered tongue-and-groove, the roofing-felt plied tight and tacked to
the eaves. And there above the neat-hinged door, balanced on the very
tip of the apex, was Tommy's target: the chrome lid of the bell of his
father's bike. Whose little zings fairly brought me to my senses.
-- Seamus Heaney, District and Circle, (which won the 2006 T. S. Eliot Prize, the most prestigious poetry award in the UK)
The ways in which the neighbour poems stage a relationship between ontology and ethics, and the role of poetry itself in this relationship, are central to the final poem I'll consider, "One Christmas Day in the Morning," which can be found framed in District and Circle by "Chow" and "The Nod." What distinguishes it from both, however, is its status as Heaney's only rural neighbour poem explicitly set during the Troubles. More than this, it is unusual in depicting a moment when the subtle and civil negotiations between Catholic and Protestant seem to go radically, and dangerously awry. "My father balked at a word like Catholic being used in company" we are told. Yet the poem uses this word three times in short succession. In this way its lexis exhibits the blundering indiscretion that is its subject:
I was blabbing on about guns, how they weren't a Catholic thing, how the
sight of the one in his house had always scared me, how our very toys at
Christmas proved my point -- when his eye upon me narrowed. 36
At this point the poem makes its move into the past, veering onto childhood terrain. When "Tommy's eye upon me narrowed," the voice of the poem is reminded of his neighbour as a boy, presumably on the Christmas day of the title (a detail which links the poem back to "An Ulster Twilight"), with a new air-gun, "dancing with his eye on the sights." The poem ends as follows:
The Evans' chicken-coop was the shape of a sentry box, walls and gable
of weathered tongue-and-groove, the roofing-felt plied tight and tacked to
the eaves. And there above the neat-hinged door, balanced on the very
tip of the apex, was Tommy's target: the chrome lid of the bell of his
father's bike. Whose little zings fairly brought me to my senses. 37
There is a double-edged quality to this moment in the poem which involves in both cases the suspension or supercession of one scene by another. It is a moment which itself turns on our reading of the phrase "fairly brought me to my senses." On one level the description of Tommy with his air-gun is part of a series of references to militarism, arming and aiming that look forward to "The Nod" and back to Station Island. The narrator is thus "fairly brought to his senses" in that he moves from the inner world of the mind back to the physical and material. The "zings" of the pellets on the target snap him out of his reverie of a simpler, more innocent past and release him into the reality of the present, newly aware of the tense situation which he has created. "Being brought to one's senses" in this context is an apt description of the way in which in Heaney the encounter with the other involves the recognition of an ontological reality that is attested to through bodily affect. It is this aspect which I have been terming political. However, as mentioned above, there is also a second reading. The noise of pellets hitting their target "brings the narrator to his senses" in that it reminds him of a shared childhood memory and, in the implicit equation between the bell above the coop and the nativity star above the stable, a common religious inheritance at odds with the kind of cultural differences he has been suggesting. He is thus "brought to his senses" in that he attains a more objective and reasonable view of his relationship with the neighbour. Here then is the ethical lesson of the poem. Thus once again the end of the poem exhibits an ambiguity: it is equally possible that the narrator returns to the moment newly reconciled to alliance and affinity with the neighbour, and that he comes back with a heightened sense of difference from the martial other. One achievement of the poem is to imply that a situation such as the one described will inevitably involve both emotions. Another more complex implication is that its abstract ethical dimension is inseparable from its material, political one.
II New York Times's Op-Docs, For Seamus by Kerrin Sheldon and Elaine McMillion Sheldon
This short film, titled
For Seamus (06:26), celebrates the life and work of Seamus Heaney, the most famous contemporary poet in Ireland.
Updated:
Commentary excerpted from
Senior Infants: Connecting with Seamus Heaney's Poetry
. The nature of the incident and the tension it caused emanated from sectarian sensitivities within Irish communities during the period when those with extremists views formed or joined militias and took up arms. During the so-called Troubles there were countless incidents of violence and murder between Catholic republicans and Protestant loyalists. The wisest thing, as Heaney's own father had intimated, was to keep your Catholic mouth shut in public for fear of causing offence with its subsequent potential for reprisal; the so-called Troubles began in the late 1960s and, beyond constant sectarian tension, erupted particularly viciously from time to time;
......
. irony: the situation described is totally at odds with a title that echoes a Christmas carol of goodwill;
. despite of his choice of prose, Heaney loses nothing of the poet in himself: deliberate group of assonant sounds, for example, the [ai] of the first and fourth paragraphs, the [i] sounds of paragraph 4 and clusters of alliterative consonants, for example, alveolar plosive [t] in the final paragraph.
Below is my response haiku situated in an inner city
teenage boys stare
at the nativity star ...
pop, pop, pop of gunshots
