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Wintering Out
'Seamus Heaney has gone beyond the themes of his earlier poetry and has made the giant step towards the most ambitious, most intractable themes of maturity. The power of this book comes from a sense that he is reaching out towards a type of desolation and of isolation without which no imagination can be seen to have grown up.' Eavan Boland, Irish Times'Keyed and pitched unlike any other significant poet at work in the language anywhere.' Harold Bloom, Times Literary Supplement
Hardcover
First published January 1, 1972
About the author
Seamus Heaney
343 books964 followersWorks of Irish poet Seamus Justin Heaney reflect landscape, culture, and political crises of his homeland and include the collections
Wintering Out
(1972) and
Field Work
(1979) as well as a translation of
Beowulf
(1999). He won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1995.
This writer and lecturer won this prize "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."
Heaney on Wikipedia.
This writer and lecturer won this prize "for works of lyrical beauty and ethical depth, which exalt everyday miracles and the living past."
Heaney on Wikipedia.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 42 reviews
March 2, 2019
Seamus Heaney has an extraordinary ability—to take contemporary socio-political situations, historical observations, natural phenomena, religious dogma, and even personal confessionals—and turn them all into the highest form of art. There is no fluff with Heaney, only deep reflection and introspection on what is happening around him. To truly appreciate his art, I have learned and accepted the need to always have access to a dictionary, and to delve deeper into the context of every poem. So, reading Heaney is a mental workout, but like its physical counterpart, in the end, the reward far outweighs the effort.
Many of the poems in Wintering Out are about factoring the coming of winter or surviving it. Although there are more important themes than that at work here. The collection is divided into two sections. The political and historical feature heavily in the first section. In a resentment towards British colonial rule of Ireland, he writes in ‘Midnight’ about the extinction of the wolf and how it was ‘crossed /With inferior strains’ an allusion to the mingling of British with the Irish perhaps. But the poem ends with the strongest note of resentment from Heaney, for in the same way ‘the wolf has died out,’ the oppression of colonial rule blocked the voices of the free and proud ‘The tongue’s /Leashed in my throat.’
In ‘The Tollund Man’ we see Heaney’s inspiration derived from the photo of the archeological dig that will eventually result in the bog poems of his next collection North:
Heaney returns in this collection and in most of his early works to the theme of religion, that great divider of Protestants and Catholics that fueled much of the “Troubles” in a strongly-worded poem, ‘Servant Boy:’
It is not often that Heaney uses words like whore or slave, but they work to great effect here. Have you guessed whether this servant boy is a Protestant or Catholic? Hint: Heaney is a Catholic.
What I found especially gorgeous were the poems in Part II revolving around women. Maybe gorgeous is the wrong word, considering the dark context, but then again, it just may be the right word because I have not encountered many poems on women by Heaney (certainly not in one collection). An excerpt from ‘A Winter’s Tale:’
Sadly, the women are weak and at the mercy of men who seldom have mercy, as this excerpt of an assaulted mermaid demonstrates, from ‘Maighdean Mara:’
But context is key. Despite the fiction, it is spawned from a news item Heaney read about a woman drowned (Seán Oh-Eocha) and the circumstances around it. Heaney has taken her to be a mermaid, wanting to return to the sea, and found in his own imagination, the miseries (= man’s lust) that she has had to endure. It is a sad, moving poem, but also a great way to keep her memory alive.
The darkest poem is the confessional one of Heaney, ‘Somnambulist,’ which follows after ‘A Summer Home’ detailing a holiday crisis with his wife. ‘Somnambulist’ is an obscure poem, Heaney keeping a vague distance from direct implication with yet yearning to confess his offense against the wife and mother of his children:
I could ramble on about every poem because each one is loaded and waiting to trigger an emotion with the reader. I definitely found the second part, albeit its theme of women in distress, more interesting as I discovered a new side of Heaney and a new poetic prowess. What a poet!
References:
Corcoran, N., The Poetry of Seamus Heaney (1998), Faber and Faber Ltd.
Many of the poems in Wintering Out are about factoring the coming of winter or surviving it. Although there are more important themes than that at work here. The collection is divided into two sections. The political and historical feature heavily in the first section. In a resentment towards British colonial rule of Ireland, he writes in ‘Midnight’ about the extinction of the wolf and how it was ‘crossed /With inferior strains’ an allusion to the mingling of British with the Irish perhaps. But the poem ends with the strongest note of resentment from Heaney, for in the same way ‘the wolf has died out,’ the oppression of colonial rule blocked the voices of the free and proud ‘The tongue’s /Leashed in my throat.’
In ‘The Tollund Man’ we see Heaney’s inspiration derived from the photo of the archeological dig that will eventually result in the bog poems of his next collection North:
Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His patented skin cap.
In the flat country nearby
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,
…
Heaney returns in this collection and in most of his early works to the theme of religion, that great divider of Protestants and Catholics that fueled much of the “Troubles” in a strongly-worded poem, ‘Servant Boy:’
He is wintering out
the back-end of a bad year,
swinging a hurricane lamp
through some outhouse;
a jobber among shadows.
Old work-whore, slave-
blood, who stepped fair-hills
under each bidder’s eye
…
It is not often that Heaney uses words like whore or slave, but they work to great effect here. Have you guessed whether this servant boy is a Protestant or Catholic? Hint: Heaney is a Catholic.
What I found especially gorgeous were the poems in Part II revolving around women. Maybe gorgeous is the wrong word, considering the dark context, but then again, it just may be the right word because I have not encountered many poems on women by Heaney (certainly not in one collection). An excerpt from ‘A Winter’s Tale:’
A pallor in the headlights’
Range wavered and disappeared.
Weeping, blood bright from her cuts
Where she’d fled the hedged and wired
Road, they eyed her nakedness
Astray among the cattle
At first light. Lanterns, torches
And the searchers’ gay babble
She eluded earlier:
Now her own people only
Closed around her dazed whimper
With rugs, dressings and brandy—
Conveying maiden daughter
Back to family hearth and floor.
Why run, our lovely daughter,
Bare-breasted from our door?
Sadly, the women are weak and at the mercy of men who seldom have mercy, as this excerpt of an assaulted mermaid demonstrates, from ‘Maighdean Mara:’
II
He stole her garment as
She combed her hair:
Follow was all she could do.
He hid it in the eaves
And charmed her there, four walls,
Warm floor, man-love nightly
In earshot of the waves.
She suffered milk and birth—
She had no choice—conjured
Patterns of home and drained
The tidesong from her voice.
Then the thatcher came and stuck
Her garment in a stack.
Children carried tales back.
But context is key. Despite the fiction, it is spawned from a news item Heaney read about a woman drowned (Seán Oh-Eocha) and the circumstances around it. Heaney has taken her to be a mermaid, wanting to return to the sea, and found in his own imagination, the miseries (= man’s lust) that she has had to endure. It is a sad, moving poem, but also a great way to keep her memory alive.
The darkest poem is the confessional one of Heaney, ‘Somnambulist,’ which follows after ‘A Summer Home’ detailing a holiday crisis with his wife. ‘Somnambulist’ is an obscure poem, Heaney keeping a vague distance from direct implication with yet yearning to confess his offense against the wife and mother of his children:
Nestrobber’s hands
and a face in its net of gossamer;
he came back weeping
to unstarch the pillow
and freckle her sheets
with tiny yolk.
I could ramble on about every poem because each one is loaded and waiting to trigger an emotion with the reader. I definitely found the second part, albeit its theme of women in distress, more interesting as I discovered a new side of Heaney and a new poetic prowess. What a poet!
References:
Corcoran, N., The Poetry of Seamus Heaney (1998), Faber and Faber Ltd.
July 16, 2020
The next volume in my trip through Seamus Heaney’s collected works did not disappoint. Full to the brim of vivid imagery and wonderful lexical journeys. Next, please...
Veteran’s Dream
Mr Dickson, my neighbour,
Who saw the last cavalry charge
Of the war and got the first gas
Walks with a limp
Into his helmet and khaki,
He notices indifferently
The gas has yellowed his buttons
And near his head
Horses plant their shods.
His real fear is gangrene.
He wakes with his hand to the scar
And they do their white magic
Where he lies
On cankered ground,
A scatter of maggots, busy
In the trench of his wound.
Veteran’s Dream
Mr Dickson, my neighbour,
Who saw the last cavalry charge
Of the war and got the first gas
Walks with a limp
Into his helmet and khaki,
He notices indifferently
The gas has yellowed his buttons
And near his head
Horses plant their shods.
His real fear is gangrene.
He wakes with his hand to the scar
And they do their white magic
Where he lies
On cankered ground,
A scatter of maggots, busy
In the trench of his wound.
May 5, 2021
Heaney's a mad lad for this, absolutely bonkers
August 7, 2021
In ‘Wintering Out’ my favourite was the sad, empathetic “Limbo”
“Fishermen at Ballyshannon
Netted an infant last night
Along with the salmon.
An illegitimate spawning,
A small one thrown back
To the waters. But I'm sure
As she stood in the shallows
Ducking him tenderly
Till the frozen knobs of her wrists
Were dead as the gravel,
He was a minnow with hooks
Tearing her open.
She waded in under
The sign of the cross.
He was hauled in with the fish.
Now limbo will be
A cold glitter of souls
Through some far briny zone.
Even Christ's palms, unhealed,
Smart and cannot fish there.”
October 30, 2018
Reading Seamus Heaney puts me in such a weird floaty headspace. It's impossible to read these poems quickly or distractedly. They're like fever dreams made of language.
July 7, 2021
My first exposure to Heaney’s work was his translation of Beowulf. Many years passed and his poetry flew under my radar until I listened to Lisa Hannigan’s captivating musical rendition of 'Anahorish,’ which I didn’t know was his poem at first.
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.
Anahorish, soft gradient
of consonant, vowel-meadow,
after-image of lamps
swung through the yards
in winter evenings
With pails and barrows
those mound-dwellers
go waist-deep in mist
to break the light ice
at wells and dunghills.
It was not until I searched for the lyrics that I realized it was a poem from Heaney’s Wintering Out. I was immediately captivated and placed his collected works on my reading list. And here we are, after having also read the two poetry collections that precede this volume: Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark.
Wintering Out, like most of Heaney’s work, is a voyage to Northern Ireland—it’s nature, people, politics and cultural landscapes. Full of folklore, proverbs and allusions to the Irish language, Heaney paints the picture of a winter that is comfortless but not without hope. To me, Wintering Out is about finding peace in the fact that no spring is promised; and about surviving by knowing when to seek shelter. It made me think about my own shelters and sites of refuge.
It gives a “if you’ve survived such strong a winter, you’ll enjoy summer anywhere” kind of vibe.
PS: save this read for winter and not a warm Puerto Rican summer.
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.
Anahorish, soft gradient
of consonant, vowel-meadow,
after-image of lamps
swung through the yards
in winter evenings
With pails and barrows
those mound-dwellers
go waist-deep in mist
to break the light ice
at wells and dunghills.
It was not until I searched for the lyrics that I realized it was a poem from Heaney’s Wintering Out. I was immediately captivated and placed his collected works on my reading list. And here we are, after having also read the two poetry collections that precede this volume: Death of a Naturalist and Door into the Dark.
Wintering Out, like most of Heaney’s work, is a voyage to Northern Ireland—it’s nature, people, politics and cultural landscapes. Full of folklore, proverbs and allusions to the Irish language, Heaney paints the picture of a winter that is comfortless but not without hope. To me, Wintering Out is about finding peace in the fact that no spring is promised; and about surviving by knowing when to seek shelter. It made me think about my own shelters and sites of refuge.
It gives a “if you’ve survived such strong a winter, you’ll enjoy summer anywhere” kind of vibe.
PS: save this read for winter and not a warm Puerto Rican summer.
December 12, 2021
Is there life before death? That's chalked up
on a wall downtown. Competence with pain,
coherent miseries, a bit and sup,
we hug our little destiny again.
on a wall downtown. Competence with pain,
coherent miseries, a bit and sup,
we hug our little destiny again.
August 11, 2021
This is Heaney's third poetry collection and the weakest, but only because it's so uneven, it still has a lot to offer and some great moments. Highlights ~ "The Last Mummer" "Gifts of Rain" "Oracle" "Traditions" "Midnight" "The Tollund man" "Veteran's Dream" "Summer Home" "Limbo" and "Westering".
January 24, 2020
A master of sound and sense.
July 7, 2022
Heaney's third collection is deep and thoughtful. "The Wool Trade" is a memorable poem, which compares the harsher North with the Republic.
November 27, 2022
The second half of this collection saved this from a 2 star rating.
December 29, 2017
Of the many forms that musical compositions can take—the sonata, the rondo, the passacaglia, etc.—the intermezzo has historically been a subordinate form. A step-cousin to its other, more sophisticated and substantial forms, the intermezzo—as it name suggests—often functions as a 'bridging' piece snuck in in between larger, more substantive movements (in instrumental compositions, such as Shostakovich's String Quartet No. 15), or in between one signature aria and the next (in an opera). This is especially evident in the operatic context, where the intermezzo as something of a musical palate cleanser—a respite from the luscious marbling of dramatic, heart-rending arias—is often the norm.
Yet, there are times when the intermezzo is elevated to a musical status higher than it is usually accustomed to. Brahms's Three Intermezzi, for instance, is a pinnacle of sorts – not only of Brahms's mature musicality and compositional craft, but also of the entire Romantic musical tradition of which Brahms was a true torch-bearer. And even in the operatic context, an intermezzo's popularity has occasionally—and ironically, perhaps—come to exceed that of its opera. The best example, of course, is the beloved 'Intermezzo' from Puccini's Manon Lescaut, which perfectly encapsulates the parting grief of the lovers in Prévost's story. In 1924, Richard Strauss (who famously dismissed U.S. army officials by saying, "I am the composer of Der Rosenkavalier, leave me alone.") even wrote a semi-autobiographical opera, ironically titled Intermezzo.
That Heaney's third collection, Wintering Out, is an intermezzo of sorts is precisely the sort of dangerous opinion an amateur reader would venture, passing judgment on what is undoubtedly a buried giant of Irish letters. Yet the more pressing question is this: is it the sort of intermezzo of a Brahmsian stature? Sadly, one can only conclude after reading Wintering Out that it is not. Rather, it is, as another reviewer has put it so well before me, a prelude to the much more poetically charged and potently imageristic North—an intermezzo between his earlier, breathtaking Death of a Naturalist and Door Into the Dark , and the later collection, North . Many of the poems in Wintering Out are puzzling, both in terms of comprehensibility and technique. In terms of comprehensibility, many of the poems are so heavily contextual that it is almost virtually impossible to understand what the poem is referring to unless one is familiar—or familiarises oneself—with the factual background of its composition. The poems "Oracle" and "Linen Town", in particular, were so difficult to unlock that it was only with some understanding of their contextual background that one had any hope of beginning to grasp at its basic, semantic meaning. And then a poem such as "Sonnambulist" basically defies any possibility of understanding at all that the better strategy would be to just let the music of words wash over one's auditory imagination.
The second puzzling aspect of Wintering Out is the way Heaney employs his poetic technique, which—inferentially—should be of a certain sophistication and maturity by the time he wrote the collection. However, as noted in Michael Parker's essay, some of the pieces in Wintering Out contain "missing harmonies and rhymes", "irregular stresses [that] make[s] the poem labor to get off the ground", and "flailing analogies and ... ill-matched juxtapositions". This, Parker thinks, "well illustrates the disorientating effects of political collapse on the poetic imagination". Yet, it is one thing to think that Heaney deliberately employed uncomfortable, clunky techniques to underline what must have been a massively disturbing political (and private) landscape (and what is public and private is not, simplistically, a binary matter, as Arendt has so cogently shown in The Human Condition ); but it is another to call it what it is: just not very good.
So although it contains some of the most signature Heaney poems—especially "Anahorish", "Land", "Toome", "Broagh", "A Northern Hoard", "The Tollund Man", "Wedding Day", "Mother of the Groom", "Summer Home", "Serenades", and "Dawn"—the rest of the collection, regrettably, is not of Heaney's usual standard.
Yet, there are times when the intermezzo is elevated to a musical status higher than it is usually accustomed to. Brahms's Three Intermezzi, for instance, is a pinnacle of sorts – not only of Brahms's mature musicality and compositional craft, but also of the entire Romantic musical tradition of which Brahms was a true torch-bearer. And even in the operatic context, an intermezzo's popularity has occasionally—and ironically, perhaps—come to exceed that of its opera. The best example, of course, is the beloved 'Intermezzo' from Puccini's Manon Lescaut, which perfectly encapsulates the parting grief of the lovers in Prévost's story. In 1924, Richard Strauss (who famously dismissed U.S. army officials by saying, "I am the composer of Der Rosenkavalier, leave me alone.") even wrote a semi-autobiographical opera, ironically titled Intermezzo.
That Heaney's third collection, Wintering Out, is an intermezzo of sorts is precisely the sort of dangerous opinion an amateur reader would venture, passing judgment on what is undoubtedly a buried giant of Irish letters. Yet the more pressing question is this: is it the sort of intermezzo of a Brahmsian stature? Sadly, one can only conclude after reading Wintering Out that it is not. Rather, it is, as another reviewer has put it so well before me, a prelude to the much more poetically charged and potently imageristic North—an intermezzo between his earlier, breathtaking Death of a Naturalist and Door Into the Dark , and the later collection, North . Many of the poems in Wintering Out are puzzling, both in terms of comprehensibility and technique. In terms of comprehensibility, many of the poems are so heavily contextual that it is almost virtually impossible to understand what the poem is referring to unless one is familiar—or familiarises oneself—with the factual background of its composition. The poems "Oracle" and "Linen Town", in particular, were so difficult to unlock that it was only with some understanding of their contextual background that one had any hope of beginning to grasp at its basic, semantic meaning. And then a poem such as "Sonnambulist" basically defies any possibility of understanding at all that the better strategy would be to just let the music of words wash over one's auditory imagination.
The second puzzling aspect of Wintering Out is the way Heaney employs his poetic technique, which—inferentially—should be of a certain sophistication and maturity by the time he wrote the collection. However, as noted in Michael Parker's essay, some of the pieces in Wintering Out contain "missing harmonies and rhymes", "irregular stresses [that] make[s] the poem labor to get off the ground", and "flailing analogies and ... ill-matched juxtapositions". This, Parker thinks, "well illustrates the disorientating effects of political collapse on the poetic imagination". Yet, it is one thing to think that Heaney deliberately employed uncomfortable, clunky techniques to underline what must have been a massively disturbing political (and private) landscape (and what is public and private is not, simplistically, a binary matter, as Arendt has so cogently shown in The Human Condition ); but it is another to call it what it is: just not very good.
So although it contains some of the most signature Heaney poems—especially "Anahorish", "Land", "Toome", "Broagh", "A Northern Hoard", "The Tollund Man", "Wedding Day", "Mother of the Groom", "Summer Home", "Serenades", and "Dawn"—the rest of the collection, regrettably, is not of Heaney's usual standard.
February 6, 2024
2024 reread: I definitely appreciated this better now that I’ve read a lot more of Heaney’s works. I forgot how hard the two back-to-back-wedding-themed poems hit me.
* * *
Original review: Just the palate cleanser I needed after Zola. I've never been to Ireland before and I hardly know anything about it, but now I'd like to go see it for myself. My first encounter with Heaney was in IGCSE English, studying Mid-Term Break, which I remember vividly. This collection has a different kind of energy; less about people, and more about our relations to the wider world. It feels like a kind of melancholic peace, a little lost and a little lonely. But the sort of solitude one might deliberately seek in a time of uncertainty.
* * *
Original review: Just the palate cleanser I needed after Zola. I've never been to Ireland before and I hardly know anything about it, but now I'd like to go see it for myself. My first encounter with Heaney was in IGCSE English, studying Mid-Term Break, which I remember vividly. This collection has a different kind of energy; less about people, and more about our relations to the wider world. It feels like a kind of melancholic peace, a little lost and a little lonely. But the sort of solitude one might deliberately seek in a time of uncertainty.
October 22, 2016
A number of poems in this volume offer a reverent and altogether euphoric interaction with the natural landscape of Ireland. Other pieces are mournful and give homage to the past, while also expressing shame and fury at atrocities committed. Many poems are addressed to individuals. These verses capture each person’s connection to the land or to his/her trade and labor. With this volume, Heaney establishes himself as the bard of Ireland. He has a gifted eye for observing the landscape and its people by employing a language so incredibly rich and astonishing that he essentially has created a personal mythology of his homeland.
July 2, 2016
Heaney's third collection, in line with the first two, absolutely full of beautifully crafted poems. Great pictures of the Irish rural life, full of rural vocabulary, these poems make the very ground come alive. "Land" and "Gifts of Rain" rank among my all time favorite poems.
April 9, 2024
I have to confess that I have never much cared for Heaney's poems. To me they seem too clever, too well-wrought and wordy, and to me there is an underlying sense of insincerity.
Kingsley Amis wrote of Philip Larkin that "...when he told you he felt something, you could be quite sure he did feel it - a priceless asset to a poet." This is not true of Heaney; for me he is a Very Literary Sham.
The most famous and dreadful lines by Heaney came in an earlier collection with his poem about his father back-breakingly digging while Séamus' "squat pen rests; snug as a gun." between his finger and his thumb. These first lines are dreadfully echoed at the end:
"Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it."
Aaargh! The bathos of it.
The worst poem in Wintering Out is also one of his most famous, and is about the Northern Irish "Bye-child" (as in By-way) kept secret in a chicken-house by his mother. I remember how it 'hit the headlines' in 1952, and the genteel head-shaking stir it caused as we sipped our Barry's tea and considered the state of 'the peasantry'.
The second line hits us between the eyes (!) The sun is "A yolk of light".
How long did it take to think that one up ?
Then we learn that the boy is "sharp-faced as new moons".
When I read this sharp simile (many years ago now, in fact shortly after the book was published and celebrated by the Literati of Belfast) I felt outraged. How dare this son of a wealthy family with Literary Connections in London exploit and objectify with scalpel-words the poor "illegitimate" kid rescued from a cramped life with the hens ? I was an "illegitimate" kid who, fortunately, was enabled with some finagling and considerable upset to the family to be born in England during WW2, after some failed attempts at abortion. Where I was for the first year of my life, my mother never divulged. It's a total mystery. My feelings about the Hen-house Boy was that I wanted to be his brother.
For the first weeks after the Bye-child was brought in out of the cold he perched on his cot and cackled like a hen.
"Limbo", a poem about another "illegitimate spawning" (how crass!) successfully drowned by his mother and netted by fishermen, reads similarly like a Donegal-cold literary exercise. "The frozen knobs" of the mother's wrists "Were dead as the gravel".
Indeedy.
The last stanza is a typically Irish Catholic maundering about Limbo (where unbaptised souls reside), and I feel uncomfortably that I am being sermonised as an adolescent by a very clever, maybe very cruel priest using the story to make some theological point:
A cold glitter of
souls
Through some
far briny zone.
Even Christ's
palms, unhealed,
Smart and
cannot fish there."
Christ! He had to bring Christ into it!
But Heaney's poems at least are not as bad as those by his fellow Nobel Laureate, Bob Dylan.
Kingsley Amis wrote of Philip Larkin that "...when he told you he felt something, you could be quite sure he did feel it - a priceless asset to a poet." This is not true of Heaney; for me he is a Very Literary Sham.
The most famous and dreadful lines by Heaney came in an earlier collection with his poem about his father back-breakingly digging while Séamus' "squat pen rests; snug as a gun." between his finger and his thumb. These first lines are dreadfully echoed at the end:
"Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it."
Aaargh! The bathos of it.
The worst poem in Wintering Out is also one of his most famous, and is about the Northern Irish "Bye-child" (as in By-way) kept secret in a chicken-house by his mother. I remember how it 'hit the headlines' in 1952, and the genteel head-shaking stir it caused as we sipped our Barry's tea and considered the state of 'the peasantry'.
The second line hits us between the eyes (!) The sun is "A yolk of light".
How long did it take to think that one up ?
Then we learn that the boy is "sharp-faced as new moons".
When I read this sharp simile (many years ago now, in fact shortly after the book was published and celebrated by the Literati of Belfast) I felt outraged. How dare this son of a wealthy family with Literary Connections in London exploit and objectify with scalpel-words the poor "illegitimate" kid rescued from a cramped life with the hens ? I was an "illegitimate" kid who, fortunately, was enabled with some finagling and considerable upset to the family to be born in England during WW2, after some failed attempts at abortion. Where I was for the first year of my life, my mother never divulged. It's a total mystery. My feelings about the Hen-house Boy was that I wanted to be his brother.
For the first weeks after the Bye-child was brought in out of the cold he perched on his cot and cackled like a hen.
"Limbo", a poem about another "illegitimate spawning" (how crass!) successfully drowned by his mother and netted by fishermen, reads similarly like a Donegal-cold literary exercise. "The frozen knobs" of the mother's wrists "Were dead as the gravel".
Indeedy.
The last stanza is a typically Irish Catholic maundering about Limbo (where unbaptised souls reside), and I feel uncomfortably that I am being sermonised as an adolescent by a very clever, maybe very cruel priest using the story to make some theological point:
A cold glitter of
souls
Through some
far briny zone.
Even Christ's
palms, unhealed,
Smart and
cannot fish there."
Christ! He had to bring Christ into it!
But Heaney's poems at least are not as bad as those by his fellow Nobel Laureate, Bob Dylan.
February 17, 2018
who reads into distance reads | beyond us
going through seamus heaney's publications in chronological order feels like an exploration unto a man's evolution. which is something very fortunate to experience when you can realise you will like the end products from the beginning as much as you have liked those at the end. and even more so when you consider your favourite collection (Death of a Naturalist) so far was his very first one. sometimes, doing something like this can backfire--i would probably recommend reading dickens in order just so you don't get too big of a shock by how long it took him to develop his signature style--but more often than not, it becomes a showcase of artistic maturity.
this collection proves my point for, even though it didn't strike as much as death of a naturalist did, it does feel more compelling than his second one Door Into the Dark: Poems. dare i say it, it even feels better if the adjective can put it into more simple terms.
it still has its flaws. the second part does come across more well-developed than the first one, its theme somehow of a greater scope without loosing its original folk-type of sensibility. also, i don't think this is something permeating across female writers because i don't think we would ever consider describing a woman according to the apparent physical state of their breasts. it did bother me a bit but then i moved on unto the next poem and i forgot about it.
unto the next collection...
going through seamus heaney's publications in chronological order feels like an exploration unto a man's evolution. which is something very fortunate to experience when you can realise you will like the end products from the beginning as much as you have liked those at the end. and even more so when you consider your favourite collection (Death of a Naturalist) so far was his very first one. sometimes, doing something like this can backfire--i would probably recommend reading dickens in order just so you don't get too big of a shock by how long it took him to develop his signature style--but more often than not, it becomes a showcase of artistic maturity.
this collection proves my point for, even though it didn't strike as much as death of a naturalist did, it does feel more compelling than his second one Door Into the Dark: Poems. dare i say it, it even feels better if the adjective can put it into more simple terms.
it still has its flaws. the second part does come across more well-developed than the first one, its theme somehow of a greater scope without loosing its original folk-type of sensibility. also, i don't think this is something permeating across female writers because i don't think we would ever consider describing a woman according to the apparent physical state of their breasts. it did bother me a bit but then i moved on unto the next poem and i forgot about it.
unto the next collection...
July 15, 2023
This is Seamus Heaney reaching a new place on his poetic journey. In Wintering Out his process of digging turns outwards, less focused on his own past experiences and more interested in the landscape around him. He is less rural this time, he is more expansive. What's curious is that the landscape around him is not that different. Heaney is still obsessed with the soil, the land, the countryside. When he writes he can't escape these aspects of life he grew with. What he does instead is look further or deeper.
The new places of Heaney are in reality the same old landscapes but this time enriched by his artistic sharpness. It's his poetic eyes the ones that have sharpened to find the essence of the world around him with much cleaner and precise language. When he writes about places such as "Anahorish", the language carries enough power to describe the place with a stroke of verse. Similarly, but with a much darker tone, when he writes about the peat bogs in "The Tollund Man" he uncover the layers of darkness below the land with swift phrases that evoke lonely and cold scenaries. As Heaney puts it, in such places "he will feel lost, unhappy and at home". It's that sentiment the one that strikes you as you read this collection. Some poems remain too vague, but at their best you can feel at home in them. Wintering Out points to the ultimate achievement that Heaney will reach later on as his verses become much more precise and powerful.
The new places of Heaney are in reality the same old landscapes but this time enriched by his artistic sharpness. It's his poetic eyes the ones that have sharpened to find the essence of the world around him with much cleaner and precise language. When he writes about places such as "Anahorish", the language carries enough power to describe the place with a stroke of verse. Similarly, but with a much darker tone, when he writes about the peat bogs in "The Tollund Man" he uncover the layers of darkness below the land with swift phrases that evoke lonely and cold scenaries. As Heaney puts it, in such places "he will feel lost, unhappy and at home". It's that sentiment the one that strikes you as you read this collection. Some poems remain too vague, but at their best you can feel at home in them. Wintering Out points to the ultimate achievement that Heaney will reach later on as his verses become much more precise and powerful.
March 13, 2017
This complex volume of short poems beings with harvest and ends with Good Friday, literally over-wintering through its contents. Less immediately accessible than the earthy 'Death of a Naturalist', this is perhaps a more ambitious book: an attempt to create a definitively Irish aesthetic, somewhere between old history and James Joyce. As Heaney is such a physical writer, this takes the form of a 'tongue', formed from the sounds of words such as 'Anahorish' or 'Broagh' and rooted in specific places: places which are nonetheless half way between their earthly realities and a quasi-mythological status. Spooks of all kinds find their way into the book: the apparition of 'A Winter's Tale', the drowned child in 'Limbo', the mermaid of 'Maighdean Mara' ... and the many memories and half-recollected histories that riddle its pages.
There is a huge amount here: the troubled marriage of the second part (including the moving lament of 'The Mother of The Groom'), the early poems of rainfall and harvest, fairy-tale stories and ruminations on language. So much, in fact, that I do not yet feel that I have the measure of the book. It is immediately moving in places (the dreamy 'Shore Woman', for example, or the disturbing 'Bye-Child'), but I think it will take repeated readings before I being to feel that I have begin to unravel its enigmatic contents. I strongly imagine, however, that the repetition will be more than worthwhile.
There is a huge amount here: the troubled marriage of the second part (including the moving lament of 'The Mother of The Groom'), the early poems of rainfall and harvest, fairy-tale stories and ruminations on language. So much, in fact, that I do not yet feel that I have the measure of the book. It is immediately moving in places (the dreamy 'Shore Woman', for example, or the disturbing 'Bye-Child'), but I think it will take repeated readings before I being to feel that I have begin to unravel its enigmatic contents. I strongly imagine, however, that the repetition will be more than worthwhile.
February 7, 2022
I find poetry notoriously hard to put my thoughts together on. It’s so subjective. To the person, to the mood, even to the moment and what has been read before.
Having recently read some poetry I absolutely loved, this one felt no more than decent for me. There were a few poems in this collection that I really enjoyed and felt, but the majority did not hit home for me this time. They did feel better when I read them out loud and found the cadence in the words.
I know that poetry can hit differently on different days and words that make no sense on a random Sunday in February may flood the mind with meaning on a another random day in August. I will definitely read this one again and I do want to read more collections by Seamus Heaney. Sometimes it takes a while for the words to take shape in my mind, and I may just have to read a few by him before I ‘get’ his poetry. I did not feel this one alone gave me enough to understand the poet’s words.
As a poet, respected as he is, Heaney is yet to bowl me over, but this collection did make me want to seek out more, so I guess it made enough of an impact.
Having recently read some poetry I absolutely loved, this one felt no more than decent for me. There were a few poems in this collection that I really enjoyed and felt, but the majority did not hit home for me this time. They did feel better when I read them out loud and found the cadence in the words.
I know that poetry can hit differently on different days and words that make no sense on a random Sunday in February may flood the mind with meaning on a another random day in August. I will definitely read this one again and I do want to read more collections by Seamus Heaney. Sometimes it takes a while for the words to take shape in my mind, and I may just have to read a few by him before I ‘get’ his poetry. I did not feel this one alone gave me enough to understand the poet’s words.
As a poet, respected as he is, Heaney is yet to bowl me over, but this collection did make me want to seek out more, so I guess it made enough of an impact.
April 24, 2020
I picked this book up because I knew the collection had Seamus Heaney's "The Tollund Man," and I wanted to read the poem. I read about "The Tollund Man," from Anne Youngston's book Meet Me at the Museum, which I loved.
I went through Heaney's collection slowly, reading and rereading poems until I had a grasp about what they were talking about, no matter how vague. Some stood out to me better than others. I found that I liked poems by Heaney that have a narrative aspect, and preferred the poems in the second half of this collection to those in the first.
That being said, some of my favorites from the entire collection are: Broagh, The Backward Look, Cairn-Maker, Wedding Day, Summer Home, A Winter's Tale, Shore Woman, Maighdean Mara, Good-night, May, Dawn, and Westering.
I really like how Heaney plays with language and includes folklore and other bits and pieces that inspired him for his poems. As I said, some of the poems went over my head, while I found others to connect to. Overall, a good and rewarding read.
I went through Heaney's collection slowly, reading and rereading poems until I had a grasp about what they were talking about, no matter how vague. Some stood out to me better than others. I found that I liked poems by Heaney that have a narrative aspect, and preferred the poems in the second half of this collection to those in the first.
That being said, some of my favorites from the entire collection are: Broagh, The Backward Look, Cairn-Maker, Wedding Day, Summer Home, A Winter's Tale, Shore Woman, Maighdean Mara, Good-night, May, Dawn, and Westering.
I really like how Heaney plays with language and includes folklore and other bits and pieces that inspired him for his poems. As I said, some of the poems went over my head, while I found others to connect to. Overall, a good and rewarding read.
June 3, 2017
Seamus Heaney's third collection, first published in 1972, spends much of its winter journey in a landscape familiar from his earlier books. Rural Ireland, its fields and bogs, hedgerows and legends, is marvellously and evocatively brought to life. Heaney, though, had spent a year in California while writing this book and there's the sense of new horizons opening too in this book. It also contains one of my favourite Heaney poems, The Tollund Man, the first of a number of great poems that Heaney would write about the bog people of Northern Europe.
March 15, 2018
Poems about rural, Irish people and their long association with the land; carrying a barely stated political (nationalist) implication; not always fully accessible on first reading but filled with exquisite language.
Is there a conscious resonance in Midnight, where "a Quaker buck and his dogs" killed the last Irish wolf, and Ted Hughes writing of "the hairless knuckled feet/ Of the last wolf killed in Britain"?
Is there a conscious resonance in Midnight, where "a Quaker buck and his dogs" killed the last Irish wolf, and Ted Hughes writing of "the hairless knuckled feet/ Of the last wolf killed in Britain"?
September 5, 2022
Eine solide gedichtsammlung des irischen nobelpreisträgers, dessen auffasung und poetische verarbeitung der natur sehr anregend ist, dessen gedichte teilweise aber auch in allgemeinplätze abdriften. doch in seinen besten momenten ist heaney erstaunlich luzide und definitv ein autor, dessen entdeckung sich lohnt.
August 1, 2017
Besides 3 or 4 very good poems, this is a dull outing by Heaney's standards. Formally and thematically repetitive, the collection soon feels merely descriptive, producing pleasant, hollow music.
November 14, 2020
The start of Heaney's 'mature' period where we get the first bog poems, 'troubles' poems, along with poems on marriage.
June 27, 2021
As is to be expected with Heaney, a collection of beautiful imagery and a spell-binding use of language. As always, would have to recommend.
November 21, 2021
Always an absolute pleasure to read Heaney. My senses seem to run softly along his lines, gliding into gratitude. Always recommend his poetry!
October 4, 2022
it was good but there were a lot of forgettable poems
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