I liked this very much indeed. It gave me great pleasure to think again about Heaney (who I wrote on to get my place at Oxford).
I don’t agree entirely over punning. I don’t see it as a dictionary dance. I feel this criticism is the same as that made of Dylan Thomas for aligned verbiage ( and indeed I got it in the neck later when I studied creative writing in Oxford). It’s a habit steeped in the same space as Anglo-Saxon keening. It is finding pattern. Keening finds pattern in the whale road because it implies sea and in its phonetics slaughter. Heaney finds pattern in phonetics which says if it sounds like that it is aligned - we don’t need to know, like a Rothko why in a conscious sense; a guttural sense it’s of a tribe. It’s the authentic, the concrete.
Meaning must be in the sound of the word. That is the only certainty. And so it isn’t a pun. Just as four and death are not puns in mandarin. We don’t know why but there is a reason they sound similiar and it counts.
It is making language physical in sound Tree and branch go together in a wood . Sounds go together in the forest of language and profoundly. What he is saying is that they do so more than meaning. Signifier and signified are arbitrary. Onomatopoeia is not. And so if sounds club together, it matters.
Hope that makes sense. I loved your analysis very much. Heard him speak as a professor in Oxford. What a poet and thinker.
One of my favorite pieces of yours, Henry! I’m so glad you didn’t rush through it. I fell in love with Heaney’s translation of Beowulf and since then have been allowing myself to ever so slowly collect his works, to savor them.
Lovely essay! Thanks to Melanie Bettinelli's recommendation, I have been reading Heaney's sonnets all fall. Somehow I graduated with an English Lit degree and never studied Heaney academically. I have only encountered his work casually. From my very surface observations, I took all his noun compounds and punning as a deliberate echo of Joyce, so I trace an Irish influence there in his earliest wordplay. (From my commonplace on Ulysses and punning, I have "Do ptake some ptarmigan" and "Something galoptious. Saint Patrick converted him to Christianity. Couldn't swallow it all however." And a reference to an epigram: "The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, 'I am not; therefore I cannot think.'" Joyce's compound words: "In long lassoes from the Cock lake the water flowed full, covering greengoldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing . . . Listen: a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos."
I find the analogy to kukasoittii profound. And I would extend this to a telephone exchange and my comments and the significance of words that sound similiar. In an old fashion exchange, each number is clicked through. There is a passage where, for a time, different journey travel on the same path. Although the telephone number of the undertakers and my girlfriend are only one digit apart, until the last number, they are on the same path. And so she gets calls about burying granny and they get calls which start with ;why are you dating that waster…’.
I made this up, but you get the point. The fact that in utterance the words almost match, and only a flick deviates them means they are linked like electrons in the ring at Cerne. How or why it’s hard to say, but linked none the less. This means that your kukasoittii works except that as it works, it also links to all the neighbours, all the village goes and all area codes to a lessening extent. A sublime dispersal. Heaney is in the enclosure and the words spill out into the universe.
And if this doesn’t sound like literary criticism, ask yourself how you would sing, or grunt, or paint or dance this. The language thing of phonetics is guttural and tribal and pre-linguistic. It is found in his authentic such for utterance.
Henry is right to cite the shipping forecast. Heaney is showing how out of sound can arise meaning and, like a gathering weather system at sea, it arrives eventually in the actual, conscious observations of the poem.
I thought, reading these examples, not only of the density of Hopkins' poems like "Spring" (or "As kingfishers catch fire"), but also of Hopkins' love of hyphenated compounds, as in "The Caged Skylark":
As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage,
Man's mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells —
That bird beyond the remembering his free fells;
This in drudgery, day-labouring-out life's age.
Though aloft on turf or perch or poor low stage
Both sing sometímes the sweetest, sweetest spells,
Yet both droop deadly sómetimes in their cells
Or wring their barriers in bursts of fear or rage.
Not that the sweet-fowl, song-fowl, needs no rest —
Why, hear him, hear him babble & drop down to his nest,
But his own nest, wild nest, no prison.
Man's spirit will be flesh-bound, when found at best,
But uncumberèd: meadow-down is not distressed
For a rainbow footing it nor he for his bónes rísen.
I meant Seamus Heaney when I was a sophomore at Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut. I was a budding writer, a favourite of the English department, and was therefore privileged to accompany the writers who annually visited our (large, confusing) campus. I attended Choate for three years, and met Susan Sontag, Toni Morrison, and Seamus Heaney. They were all brilliant of course, but what I remember of Seamus Heaney was his authenticity, his humility, his genuine curiosity. As we walked around the campus alone, he asked me questions about my life and experience - How did it feel to go to a school like Choate? Did I feel an outsider or a part of it all?, etc. I was no more than 16, but he struck me a person who was intentionally open and simple - with a sort of light purity of spirit. I'd never been to Ireland then, but now I live here, surrounded by farmers, fields, animals, ancient land work. I think of Heaney and his poetry nearly every day. Thank you for this essay.💚
I liked this very much indeed. It gave me great pleasure to think again about Heaney (who I wrote on to get my place at Oxford).
I don’t agree entirely over punning. I don’t see it as a dictionary dance. I feel this criticism is the same as that made of Dylan Thomas for aligned verbiage ( and indeed I got it in the neck later when I studied creative writing in Oxford). It’s a habit steeped in the same space as Anglo-Saxon keening. It is finding pattern. Keening finds pattern in the whale road because it implies sea and in its phonetics slaughter. Heaney finds pattern in phonetics which says if it sounds like that it is aligned - we don’t need to know, like a Rothko why in a conscious sense; a guttural sense it’s of a tribe. It’s the authentic, the concrete.
Meaning must be in the sound of the word. That is the only certainty. And so it isn’t a pun. Just as four and death are not puns in mandarin. We don’t know why but there is a reason they sound similiar and it counts.
It is making language physical in sound Tree and branch go together in a wood . Sounds go together in the forest of language and profoundly. What he is saying is that they do so more than meaning. Signifier and signified are arbitrary. Onomatopoeia is not. And so if sounds club together, it matters.
Hope that makes sense. I loved your analysis very much. Heard him speak as a professor in Oxford. What a poet and thinker.
One of my favorite pieces of yours, Henry! I’m so glad you didn’t rush through it. I fell in love with Heaney’s translation of Beowulf and since then have been allowing myself to ever so slowly collect his works, to savor them.
thanks :)
Lovely essay! Thanks to Melanie Bettinelli's recommendation, I have been reading Heaney's sonnets all fall. Somehow I graduated with an English Lit degree and never studied Heaney academically. I have only encountered his work casually. From my very surface observations, I took all his noun compounds and punning as a deliberate echo of Joyce, so I trace an Irish influence there in his earliest wordplay. (From my commonplace on Ulysses and punning, I have "Do ptake some ptarmigan" and "Something galoptious. Saint Patrick converted him to Christianity. Couldn't swallow it all however." And a reference to an epigram: "The philosophic evolutionist reverses and negatives the epigram. He says, 'I am not; therefore I cannot think.'" Joyce's compound words: "In long lassoes from the Cock lake the water flowed full, covering greengoldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing . . . Listen: a fourworded wavespeech: seesoo, hrss, rsseeiss, ooos."
I find the analogy to kukasoittii profound. And I would extend this to a telephone exchange and my comments and the significance of words that sound similiar. In an old fashion exchange, each number is clicked through. There is a passage where, for a time, different journey travel on the same path. Although the telephone number of the undertakers and my girlfriend are only one digit apart, until the last number, they are on the same path. And so she gets calls about burying granny and they get calls which start with ;why are you dating that waster…’.
I made this up, but you get the point. The fact that in utterance the words almost match, and only a flick deviates them means they are linked like electrons in the ring at Cerne. How or why it’s hard to say, but linked none the less. This means that your kukasoittii works except that as it works, it also links to all the neighbours, all the village goes and all area codes to a lessening extent. A sublime dispersal. Heaney is in the enclosure and the words spill out into the universe.
And if this doesn’t sound like literary criticism, ask yourself how you would sing, or grunt, or paint or dance this. The language thing of phonetics is guttural and tribal and pre-linguistic. It is found in his authentic such for utterance.
Henry is right to cite the shipping forecast. Heaney is showing how out of sound can arise meaning and, like a gathering weather system at sea, it arrives eventually in the actual, conscious observations of the poem.
I thought, reading these examples, not only of the density of Hopkins' poems like "Spring" (or "As kingfishers catch fire"), but also of Hopkins' love of hyphenated compounds, as in "The Caged Skylark":
As a dare-gale skylark scanted in a dull cage,
Man's mounting spirit in his bone-house, mean house, dwells —
That bird beyond the remembering his free fells;
This in drudgery, day-labouring-out life's age.
Though aloft on turf or perch or poor low stage
Both sing sometímes the sweetest, sweetest spells,
Yet both droop deadly sómetimes in their cells
Or wring their barriers in bursts of fear or rage.
Not that the sweet-fowl, song-fowl, needs no rest —
Why, hear him, hear him babble & drop down to his nest,
But his own nest, wild nest, no prison.
Man's spirit will be flesh-bound, when found at best,
But uncumberèd: meadow-down is not distressed
For a rainbow footing it nor he for his bónes rísen.
"Above the Brim: On Robert Frost" by Heaney is well worth your time: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40548485
I meant Seamus Heaney when I was a sophomore at Choate Rosemary Hall in Connecticut. I was a budding writer, a favourite of the English department, and was therefore privileged to accompany the writers who annually visited our (large, confusing) campus. I attended Choate for three years, and met Susan Sontag, Toni Morrison, and Seamus Heaney. They were all brilliant of course, but what I remember of Seamus Heaney was his authenticity, his humility, his genuine curiosity. As we walked around the campus alone, he asked me questions about my life and experience - How did it feel to go to a school like Choate? Did I feel an outsider or a part of it all?, etc. I was no more than 16, but he struck me a person who was intentionally open and simple - with a sort of light purity of spirit. I'd never been to Ireland then, but now I live here, surrounded by farmers, fields, animals, ancient land work. I think of Heaney and his poetry nearly every day. Thank you for this essay.💚
Thanks very much for this!
Bleb-eyed. Thank you.