Natasa Tucev, University of Nis

ESSE 4 Conference, Debrecen, 1997.

(seminar 20 - Irish Studies)

PLACE-NAMES IN THE POETRY OF SEAMUS HEANEY

In his critical study, Blake Morrison discloses an abundant list of the placenames he has traced down in Heaney's early poetry: Anahorish, Antrim, Aran, Ardboe
Point, Ballymurphy, Ballyshannon, Belderg, Belmullet, Byne, Brandon, Brandywell,
Broagh, Carrickfergus, Castledawson, Cavehill, Church Island, Coleraine, Derrygarve,
Devenish, Donegal, Drogheada, Dunseverick, Fews Forest, Glanmore, Gweebarra,
Horse Island, Kildare, Lough Beg, Lough Neagh, Malin, Mayo, Moher, Moyola,
Newton-hamilton, Newry, Portstewart, Slane, Smerwick, Strangford, Toome, Tory,
Upperlands, Ventry, Vinegar Hill, Westport, Wicklow. The geographical names seem to
have a special fascination for Heaney, and some of them, appearing in the volumes
Wintering Out and North, provide the basis for one of the major motifs of his early
poetry. History, mythology, personal memories and visual impressions are intertwined
in the so-called "place-name poems". Heaney is also fond of creating conceits in which
the physical features of a landscape are merged with the linguistic features of its name.
The majority of critics observe such poetic preoccupations in relation to the
particular historical and political context of the Northern Irish situation. For Morrison,
Heaney's interest in place-names represents a form of "political etymology, its accents
those of sectarianism.... [I]t uncovers a history of linguistic and territorial
dispossession..."1 Some other critics, such as Bernard O'Donoghue or Declan Kiberd,
discern in the same group of poems Heaney's sense of double inheritance and his
tendency to reconcile the English and Irish cultural tradition. O'Donoghue gives an
example of "Broagh", whose dialectical vocabulary exploits the full Northern Irish
linguistic complex - English, Scottish and Irish. "It is obvious", says O'Donoghue, "that
the tendency of this multistranded language... is to create an inextricable whole." 2
Declan Kiberd also believes that the "place-name poems" represent an attempt to
resolve, at the level of culture, that which has remained a brutal conflict at the level of
1

Blake Morrison: Seamus Heany, Methuen & Co., London, 1982, pp. 41-42
Bernard O'Donoghue:Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry, Harvester Wheatsheaf,
Hertfordshire, 1994, p.65
2

politics.3
There is to this group of Heaney's poems, however, a dimension which the postcolonial approach tends to neglect, probably because it is not so much concerned with
the particular historical or cultural issues, as with some general notions of poetry and
the self. The best of these poems - such as "Toome" or "Anahorish" - bear witness to a
profound feeling of kinship between the speech of a people and their natural
surroundings; or, at another level, between the innermost being of the poet himself, his
native ground, and his poetic expression.
*
In his book Myth, Truth and Literature, Colin Falck distinguishes two main
functions of language: expressive and instrumental. The expressive function is essential
in the process Falck has defined as "meaning-creation": namely, it consists in assigning
utterance to an experience which has had its previous existence only at the pre-verbal
level. Falck claims that this process of setting the words we already posses "to work
within extra-linguistic contexts within which they have never previously been set to
work" is vital and fundamental in approximating the ultimate, objective truth and
reality. It is a creative endeavour to grasp, by means of language, that portion of reality
to which we cannot as yet fully refer and which we have not yet conceptualized. As
Falck argues, "it would be a necessity of any experiencing that it should comprise an
element of 'transgressing' or of 'reaching beyond': of reaching beyond what is already
clear to what is as yet obscure; of reaching beyond what we already are to what we have
not yet become; of reaching into partly-grasped meanings beyond what language can
'get on level terms with or render completely intelligible. This process is the basis of
the expressive function of language, which may also be called creative or poetic.4
On the other hand, the instrumental or referential function of language is also
necessary. It is the activity of using language to refer to the concepts which have already
been established. In the world in which we in fact live, it is the dominant linguistic
activity: "a great deal of language-using occurs semi-automatically and largely
unintuitively, with words being used inexpressively as portions or classes of thought and
only the most minimal creativity being manifested in the application of those classes of
3
4

Declan Kiberd: Inventing Ireland, Vintage, Dublin, 1995, p. 592

Colin Falck: Myth,Truth and Literature, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 23-36

thought..." Falck points out that the further development of conceptual comprehension
might actually result in rigidified ways of thinking and quotes Shelley, who warns that
without the poetic activity language would be lost to some of "the nobler purposes of
human intercourse".5
Brian Friel's play Translations may serve well to illustrate the distinction
between the expressive and the instrumental. At the very beginning of the play, when
Manus teaches Sarah to speak, the expressive function of language is obviously at work.
Sarah suffers from a serious speech defect and everybody in the community considers
her to be dumb. The first sentence she manages to pronounce is, "My name is Sarah."
Thrilled by this success, Manus tells her, "Soon you'll be telling me all the secrets that
have been in that head of yours all these years." The pronunciation of one's name
symbolizes the first step towards shaping self-consciousness and determining one's
identity. Managing speech, according to Manus, should enable Sarah to articulate her
memories, experiences and emotions - her self and her attitude to the rest of the world.
The creation of the original Irish place-names must have also, at the time when
they were conceived, presented some kind of expressive, poetic linguistic activity: an
attempt made by the whole community to articulate, just like Sarah, the complex
amalgam of memories, anecdotes, pieties, personal attitudes and experiences which
bound them up with the locale.
Friel's play deals with a form of "linguistic colonization", i.e., with translating
the Irish toponyms to English. Liuetenant Yolland, however, to whom this duty has been
assigned, is able to sense the poetical charge inherent in the original names and is not at
ease about the 'translating' project he is conducting:
OWEN : ...And we call this crossroads Tobair Vree. And why do we call it
Tobair Vree? ...Because a hundred-and-fifty years ago there used to be a well there....
And an old man called Brian, whose face was disfigured by an enormous growth, got it
into his head that the water in that well was blessed; and every day for seven months he
went there and bathed his face in it....So the question I put to you, Lieutenant, is this:
what do we do with a name like that? Do we scrap Tobair Vree altogether and call it what? - The Cross? Crossroads? Or do we keep piety with a man long dead, long
forgotten, his name 'eroded' beyond recognition, whose trivial little story nobody in the
parish remembers?
YOLLAND: Except you.
OWEN: I've left here.
YOLLAND: You remember it.
OWEN: I'm asking you: what do we write in the Name-Book?
5

Ibid., p.61

YOLLAND: Tobair Vree.

OWEN: Even though the well is a hundred yards from the actual crossroads and there's no well anyway - and what the hell does Vree mean?
YOLLAND: Tobair Vree.

Even when etymology has become obscure due to the failure of memory or
recorded history, the inherent expressive dimension still makes a place-name valuable
and irreplaceable.
On the other hand, the toponyms newly established by the soldiers in Friel's play
epitomize the instrumental or referential aspect of language-using: far from expressing
any sort of attachment to the places they refer to, they serve merely to enable the
English army to manage and govern the territory. Underlying them are ready-made
concepts of domination and control. Yolland's and Owen's boast that each translated
name is "a perfect equation with its roots" and "a perfect congruence with its reality" is
utterly ironic.
In writing the play, as Declan Kiberd points out, Friel has been largely
influenced by Heaney's poetry. There is no doubt that for Heaney place-names possess
the same poetic, expressive quality as they do for Friel. Kiberd notices that the
pronunciation of the favourite place-names, used as a sort of 'love-language' between
Yolland and Marie in Translations, echoes similar incantations typical of Heaney's
poems - pointing to his obsession with musicality and poetic inconclusiveness of these
words.6
Falck's definition of the expressive dimension of language, however, comprises
yet another element which requires consideration: namely, that this pre-verbal
experience which we need to express can also be existent in terms of intuitive or
epiphanic recognition. Between ourselves and ultimate reality, he explains, there might
be a veil, but it might also be possible for the veil to tremble or to be partly drawn aside:
there might be special moments - epiphanies - in which reality could be seen as
revealing itself with special profundity through the appearances of ordinary life. To use
language expressively or poetically, then, would also imply to be able to recreate,
through words, these "special moments" of revelation, these "non-conceptual and
experience-transcending" modes of awareness.7
6
7

Kiberd, pp. 616-617

Falck, pp. 36-37

This concept bears close resemblance to Heaney's definition of "technique" in

poetry:
The crucial action is pre-verbal, to be able to allow the first alertness or comehither, sensed in a blurred or incomplete way, to dilate and approach as a thought or a
theme or a phrase. Robert Frost put it this way: 'a poem begins as a lump in the throat, a
homesickness, a lovesickness. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words.' As
far as I am concerned, technique is more vitally and sensitively connected with that first
activity where 'the lump in the throat' finds 'the thought' than with 'the thought' finding
'the words'. That first emergence involves the divining, vatic, oracular function... 8

Much in the tradition of the Romantic theorists and authors, whom Falck also
refers to, Heaney regards a poet as a prophet, a water-diviner, who "reaches beyond"
and uses language creatively to convey his insights to others.
Could it be argued, then, that place-names are also expressive in this respect,
that they are able to communicate some mystical, transcendental experience of the
place?
Mircea Eliade's Shamanism provides a record of the epiphanic moments in
which a landscape, or Nature in general, seems to speak for itself. It renders its
meanings to special, gifted individuals - shamans, who are able to comprehend this
"secret language" in the state of trance. As an example, Eliade relates a legend of a
South American shaman who heard a song coming from a river. He dived into the river
and surfaced only after he had learned by heart the song of the female water-spirits, who
equipped him for his vocation.9
Because of such beliefs Eliade likens shamans to poets. The special state of
mind the shaman gets into "inspires linguistic creativity and the rhythms of lyric
poetry... The purest poetic act tends to invent language anew, starting with the inner
experience which, like the ecstatic or religious rapture of 'the primitive', reveals the very
essence of things." Just like the "secret language" of shamans, certain words and
rhythms in poetry are charged with meaning: they seem to be capable of evoking the
recollection of mythical times, in illo tempore, before the connection between man and
the rest of creation was broken.10
As David Annwn has noticed, this is quite similar to the theory of language
8

Seamus Heaney:Preoccupations, Faber & Faber, London, 1980, pp. 48-49

Mircea Eliade: [amanizam, Izdava~ka Knji`arnica Zorana Stojanovi}a, Sremski Karlovci, 1990, p. 92
10
Eliade, p. 360
9

implicitly stated in Heaney's early poetry and essays. 11 Heaney finds Eliot's concept of
"auditory imagination", "sinking to the most primitive and forgotten, returning to the
origin and bringing something back" akin to his own views and explains:
I presume Eliot was thinking here about the cultural depth-charges latent in
certain words and rhythms, that binding secret between words in poetry that delights not
just the ear but the whole backward and abysm of mind and body; thinking of the
energy beating in and between words that the poet brings into half-deliberate play;
thinking of the relationship between the word as pure vocable, as articulate noise, and
the word as etymological occurrence, as symptom of human history, memory and
attachments.12

Such latent "depth-charges" are certainly present in the Irish place-names. They
seem to evoke, by their verbal music, the ancient feeling of reverence which was once
bestowed upon landscape. Heaney argues that the archaic, mythical way of thinking also
implied that the territory which provided life and sustenance, the ground which people
cultivated and on which they were dependent, was considered sacred. "Our sensing of
place was once more or less sacred. The landscape was sacramental, instinct with signs,
implying a system of reality beyond the visible realities." Even today, in a world where
the sacral vision of a place is almost completely eradicated, to know one's place of
origin and to belong to it still provides a special sort of nourishment to one's psyche and
enriches one's inner life. Heaney quotes Carson McCullers, who says that to know who
you are, you have to have a place to come from. "We are no longer innocent," says
Heaney, "we are no longer just parishioners of the local.... Yet those primary laws of our
nature are still operative. We are dwellers, we are namers, we are lovers, we make
homes and search for our histories." The modern man has to a great extent lost his
ability to credit these ancient beliefs, but poets manage, by relating their individual
visions, to recover the feeling of kinship and invent the territorial sacraments for
themselves.13
I believe that underlying both Friel's and Heaney's work is the idea that this is
the only way in which one can actually possess the territory, belong to it and feel that it
belongs to him; one cannot truly claim a territory by translating its toponyms, bringing
in military troops or imposing "acts of union". Or, as Byron would say,

11

David Annwn, Inhabited voices, Somerset, 1984, pp. 80-81

Heaney, p. 150
13
Heaney, pp. 132-149
12

Can despots compass aught that hails their sway?

Or call with truth one span of earth their own,
Save that wherein at last they crumble bone by bone?
(Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, I, 57)

Viewed in this light, the translated names 'Swinefort', 'Greencastle', 'Fairhead',

'Strandhill' or 'Whiteplains' in Friel's play are meaningless; they render no more to the
English soldiers than they do to the Irish inhabitants.
*
In the volume Wintering Out, the first place-name poem one comes across is
"Anahorish". This order is chronologically justified, as the name is connected with the
early childhood memories of the poet. Anahorish is the townland which borders
Heaney's family farm, Mossbawn. The poem starts by revealing the meaning of the
name: it is the anglicized version of anach fhior uisce, the place of clear water. The
articulation of the name first brings back personal memories and the physical
description of the natural world:
My 'place of clear water',
the first hill in the world
where springs washed into
the shiny grass
and darkened cobbles
in the bed of the lane.

And also the image of contemporary human presence:

after-image of lamps
swung through the yards
on winter evenings.

The famous lines of the poem are the result of a deeper plunge, one which
reveals that the terrain has disclosed its name to the inhabitants, that human language
takes nourishment from natural shapes:
Anahorish, soft gradient
of consonant, vowel- meadow

The poem ends with the image of a misty dawn, which may also be the dawn of
time, the dawn of civilization:

With pails and barrows

those mound-dwellers
go waist-deep in mist
to break the light ice
at wells and dunghills.

The phrase "mound-dwellers" is deliberately imprecise, "misty", as the poet's

notion of the ancient inhabitants to whom the place-name owes its existence. "The
primary laws of our nature are still operative": clear water is one of the necessities of
life, alike for us and for the "innocent parishioners of the local". It is also a symbol of
fertility, as dunghills and wells in the final line suggest. With its shifting impressions,
'Anahorish' is partly homage to the poetic, mythic activity of the archaic "mounddwellers" who condensed their feeling of reverence into the place-name; and partly
Heaney's endeavour to connect this feeling to his personal experience of his native
ground.
In comparison to "Anahorish", "Toome" represents a more deliberate, selfconscious plunge, and the myth underlying the sacral vision of the place is here more
precisely defined. The poem starts with a physical description: upon saying the name
'Toome' aloud, the lips make a round shape and the tongue lifts up. Heaney seems to
remind us of a phase in the evolution of human language, of the expressive bodily
gestures which ontologically precede articulation, but which still underlie it and make
us aware of our origins:
My mouth holds round
the soft blastings,
Toome, Toome,
as under the dislodged
slab of the tongue
I push into a souterrain

"To dislodge the slab of the tongue" also means to reach for the deeper meanings
of the place-name Toome, beyond its everyday, referential usage. It is an attempt to
grasp this word's expressive, poetic dimension. "The soft blastings" (i.e., "the depthcharges") of the word Toome are capable of evoking the past whose remnants the place
preserves: "musket-balls", as reminders of the turbulent history of the place, and
archaeological finds such as "torcs" or "fragmented ware", which recall the ancient
Celtic culture. The movement of the poem is backwards and downwards, through "a

hundred centuries", until the final, epiphanic experience of the territory and the self:
...I am sleeved in
alluvial mud that shelves
suddenly under
bogwater and tributaries
and elvers tail my hair.

The last line suggests the image of Medusa Gorgona, whose hair is "tailed" with
snakes. As Robert Graves explains, Medusa is one of the appearances of the Triple
Goddess, a female deity worshipped throughout pre-historic Europe. Medusa's face
which incites horror was originally supposed to frighten the trespassers and protect the
secrets of the poetic alphabet from being divulged or misused.14 The language of ancient
poetry ( just like the language shamans learn in their trance) is secret and sacred: its
single theme is to celebrate the Mother Goddess, the Goddess of Earth, who embodies
the primeval bond between people and their natural surroundings.
The poet has also reached the source of his inspiration and creativity, his anima
or muse: he assumes the female voice of Medusa and is "sleeved" in the feminine
elements of water, earth and mud. The language of poetry, the native ground and the
centre of the poet's being thus seem to be essentially united. By dwelling poetically and
imaginatively upon a place-name, Heaney has discovered his own sense of piety for the
territory and the relevance it has for his art.
Natasa Tucev, University of Nis
PLACE-NAMES IN THE POETRY OF SEAMUS HEANEY
Abstract
Whereas the majority of critics observe Heaney's interest in place-names in relation to
the particular historical and cultural context of Northern Ireland, it is the contention of this
paper that the "place-name poems" also refer to some general notions of poetry and the self.
Heaney's literary essays, Colin Falck's study Myth, Truth and Literature and Mircea Eliade's
Shamanism are employed to examine the relationship between land and language expressed in
these poems.
The creation of place-names represents a poetic, expressive linguistic activity of the
14

Robert Graves: The White Goddess, Faber & Faber, London, 1986, p.231

whole community in their attempt to articulate the complex amalgam of memories, anecdotes,
pieties, personal attitudes and experiences which bind them up with the locale. According to
Falck, such a form of language-using is essential as it enables us to grasp that portion of reality
which has had its previous existence only at the pre-verbal level. This pre-verbal experience can
also be existent in terms of intuitive or epiphanic recognition. Eliade's Shamanism provides a
record of the epiphanic moments in which a landscape, or Nature in general, seems to speak for
itself. It renders its meanings to special, gifted individuals - shamans, who are able to
comprehend this 'secret language' in the state of trance. Parallels with Heaney's essays show that
he is aware of the inherent expressive dimension of certain words and rhythms (the Irish placenames among them) and that epiphanic experience plays an important part in his poetic credo.
Heaney also comments upon the feeling of sacredness which was once bestowed upon
landscape and points out that modern poets, by relating their individual visions, tend to recover
this feeling.
Two of the place-name poems are analysed - "Anahorish" and "Toome". With its
shifting impressions, "Anahorish" is partly homage to the poetic, mythic activity of the archaic
inhabitants who condensed their feeling of reverence into the place-name; and partly Heaney's
endeavour to connect this feeling to his personal experience of his native ground. "Toome"
represents a more deliberate, self-conscious plunge. Here the poet reaches the source of his
inspiration and creativity, his anima or muse. By dwelling poetically and imaginatively upon a
place-name, he discovers his own sense of piety for the territory and the relevance it has for his
art.