“To set the darkness echoing”

––
The Role of Nature and History in
Heaney's Poetry and Marquard's Philosophy

by Sven Kretzschmar

– — ›1‹ — ‒
(The following pages start with the transcript of a think piece presentation on
Seamus Heaney's poem 'Personal Helicon' I had the pleasure to give in Eva
Michely's seminar Of Shapes and Shingle: British Poetry since 1945 on the 1st
of December 2015. The language used is thus not always absolutely formal.)

Making Sense Through Sense Perception

1. First Things First: Form and Formality

At the beginning, I would like to point out what I do not know about 'Personal
Helicon': the poem is dedicated to the Northern Irish poet Michael Longley,
with whom Heaney met during their time in The Belfast Group, a circle of
poets. I have no idea if there was a particular reason for this dedication. Yet this
will – hopefully – not stand in our way of making sense of the poem.
I do not intend too pay much heed the formal stuff. The poem gives us
enough other things to think about, I suppose. It – 'Personal Helicon', that is –
consists of five stanzas, with four lines each. Unsurprisingly, the metre is more
or less iambic (as is fairly usual for the English language), but its foot seems to
be irregular, as far as a quick glimpse reveals.
For the most part, the rhyme scheme is slightly un-regular (not
irregular!)1: a-b-a-b, thus a cross rhyme, but with the b-end rhyme being very
assonant for the most part.
The first stanza introduces a theme in a general manner, starting with the
childhood days of the narrator. The poem then displays a movement to the
narrator's present in the last stanza, with particular instantiations of places and
memories of perceptions.

1 I will come back to that notion and explain it in section 3.

– — ›2‹ — ‒
 2. From Form to Content...

Starting with the past, the 1st stanza presents the reader with the narrator's
childhood-self's general interest in water places, i. e. places where water comes
to the surface of the earth and where therefore wells can be found 2. The 2nd
stanza goes from generality to particularity and concerns a specific well. It thus
offers the reader specific impressions and descriptions. The 3rd stanza, too, is
about a specific well. There are specific impressions and descriptions in this
stanza as well. Stanza 4 goes back to the generalizing mode again in its first
half, then turns to a particular well like the prior two stanza. The idea of sound
comes in and gets named as “music”3.
The whole of the poem is based on impressions the narrator 4 had and
thus on sense perception, which is reflected in the vocabulary used to describe
those impressions with a positive connotation: “loved the dark drop” 5,
“savoured the rich crash”6, “soft”7. The language and vocabulary used in
stanzas 1 to 4 is neutral to positive, than changes in the course of stanza 4 (the
appearance of the rat; “scaresome”8) and to the 5th stanza: “finger slime”9 (this
might be a great activity for children, but certainly not from the adult
perspective Heaney takes in the 5th stanza). The word “scaresome” marks the

2 In the English language, a well can be a fountain, i. e. a crafted and thus artificial thing, or it can be
a spring, which is a natural source. Heaney does not indicate about which sort of well he is talking
in the poem.

3 'Personal Helicon', p. 15, s.4, l.2, in: Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground.

4 I take it the poet and the narrator are one and the same person in this case, for 'Personal Helicon'
can be found in Heaney's Opened Ground collection, which is – as far as Bert Hornback has told
me – a sort of biography compiled by Mr. Heaney himself.

5 'Personal Helicon', s.1, l.3.

6 Ibid., s.2, l.2.

7 Ibid., s.3, l.3.

8 Ibid., s.4, l.3.

9 Ibid., s.5, l.1.

– — ›3‹ — ‒
discovery that things can be unpleasant in some way or another even if they
appeared to be nice and interesting at first sight.
Although the poem's title refers – more or less explicitly – to sounds,
these do not play a role in every stanza. There are, however, sense perception
words used throughout the poem, about sound, but also about visual
perception, tactile perception, and smell.

3. ...and From Content to Interpretation

The un-regularity10 and – at least in part – assonance of the end rhymes could
be understood to reflect the change in sounds that happens through the filter of
a helicon, a well, or a poem. How can we make sense of that? The breath of the
musician flows into the helicon, sound comes out and thus music is created.
The voice of the child flows into the well, sound comes out and thus an echo is
created. The voice, or words, or thoughts of the poet find their way into the
poem (or onto the paper, that is) to create a sound of words read out loud, a
sound of spoken language11.
As a child, the poet could use almost all perceptive modes to investigate
wells. Now, as an adult, he cannot do the same, it seems, for “to finger slime” 12
is a behaviour which is not adequate for adults. Yet, he still does the same
things he did as a child in some way; it is just that the means are different now.
The narrator seems to approach poetry with the same state of mind he had
10 I decided to use 'un-regular', because the term 'irregular' seems to imply that there is an overall rule
but that the poet decides to deflect from that rule one in very few cases. In 'Personal Helicon',
however, the rule for the b-end rhymes seems to be that they do not rhyme; it is very hard already to
assign the notion of assonance there. Only in the last stanza we can find b-end rhymes that rhyme:
“spring” and “echoing”. Therefore, I opted for 'un-regluar' to mark a deflection from the rule where
a rule is almost invisible.

11 The underlying assumption here is, of course, that the poem is meant to be read out loud eventually.

12 'Personal Helicon', s.5, l.1.

– — ›4‹ — ‒
when approaching wells as a child: there is an interest in exploring,
discovering, and explaining the world he perceives.
Back then it was the external world that needed to be understood, now it
is the inner world: he rhymes to see his Self. This is the link to Narcissus, the
mythical figure who fell in love with his own reflection in the mirror. The
legend says that Narcissus saw himself in the reflection of a lake. He was not
able to but sought anyway to recognize himself in the reflection. The child sees
his reflection, too, in the water of the well. By inference, this seems to be a
symbol for the search of self-awareness. The big eyes of Narcissus in Heaney's
poem might symbolize the child's curiosity, and what the eyes see in the
surface of the well is sort of an image of the Self (even though just of the shell
of the person – thus the surface of the well mirrors the surface of the person). I
will come back to that in a second.
Yet, these times are gone now. As stated in footnote 4, my assumption is
that the narrator is a grown man. Nowadays he is using poetry in search of self-
awareness. “I rhyme | To see myself, to set the darkness echoing” 13. “[R]hyme”
might be said to be a pars pro toto, standing either for the poem, for poetry in
general, or for the process of creating poetry. The darkness, I assume, stands
for the intellectual state of not knowing something or not knowing about
something. If that assumptions holds water (like a well; no pun intended),
darkness is implicitly opposed to the state of enlightenment, which does not
only mean to simply switch on a light, but also to enlighten one's understanding
(as was the goal of the movement in the history of thought called
Enlightenment). If poetry is used to make the poet visible to himself (“see
myself”) we might be justified to assume that the echo that is set into motion
and that is coming back from the darkness is a form of enlightenment, even
though probably not in the physical sense of the word, but rather in an
intellectual sense. An echo is something that sets out through me and from me

13 Ibid., s.5, l.3-4.

– — ›5‹ — ‒
and returns to me, which makes me the source of it. Hence in this poem,
various entities turn into sources and are linked with each other to create
something new14: understanding, knowledge, enlightenment.
And here we come back to Narcissus and the boy seeing themselves in
the sources or rather: the wells. They look into mirroring surfaces of water, in
which they can see themselves, so the look goes out from the individual but
returns to him as well. But still the surface of the water is indispensable as the
mediating means between me and my recognition15 and self-awareness16.

(This is where the original paper for Eva's seminar ends. The rest of this essay
consists more or less of a congeries of think pieces.)

A Belated Introduction

Where does that leave us? We have seen the poet's keen interest in the quest for
understanding and his closeness to nature – in this one poem. These are,
however, topics that keep reoccurring in Heaney's oeuvre as we will see
hereinafter.
In a fairly recent lecture17, my highly esteemed colleague and good
friend Eva Michely pointed out that Heaney's poetry displays a love for nature

14 The creation of something new or something that has not been there before in the form that it is
there now, one could say, is just the very purpose of a well. Obviously, this is a teleological way of
arguing and it might not be absolutely coherent in any instance; but it still serves to illustrate the
argument in this case, I suppose.

15 In the case of Heaney as a boy and in the case of Narcissus, who both look into, or rather: onto
surfaces.

16 In the case of the adult poet or narrator, who has an insight into his own inside through thoughts
that are themselves represented through words.

17 Said lecture was given at Saarland University on the 8th of December, 2015 as a part of Prof.
Joachim Frenk's lecture course on English Literature, 1945-2015.

– — ›6‹ — ‒
and for creaturely life without being sentimental about it. No wonder, one
might say, that this being in touch with nature can be traced in his prose texts as
well. The following remarks and considerations will try to do exactly that,
namely to track the traces of nature, history, and the soil, and the poet's
relationship to and his understanding of these topics in selected poems and
essays. We will also have a look at another Irish poet, a man who goes by the
name of John Sheahan, and his way of approaching nature and history. We will
then proceed to the late German philosopher Odo Marquard and try to connect
the works of the two poets with a philosophical approach that Marquard calls
'Theory of Compensation'.

Heaney's Home Ground – The Soil for Thought

In 'Crediting Poetry', his 1995 Nobel Lecture, Seamus Heaney states that he
comes from a rural background18. Even as a boy he must have had a keen
interest in understanding and getting to know the world around him. This might
have been a pre-aware interest for the child, but the adult poet seems very
aware of it when he says that “it was not only the earth that shook for us: the
air around and above us was alive and signalling also” 19. Heaney recalls there
his childhood in County Derry, when he sets out to harbour an interest in his
environment, in things he can see and feel – things he can perceive. Just two
pages later, he talks about being startled by the various sounds of language he
hears on the radio: “I had already begun a journey into the wideness of the
world. This in turn became a journey into the wideness of language” 20. Putting

18 'Crediting Poetry. The Nobel Lecture, 1995', p. 447, in: Seamus Heaney. Opened Ground,.

19 Ibid.

20 Ibid., p. 449.

– — ›7‹ — ‒
those – admittedly rather few – insights together with his poem 'Personal
Helicon', we might conclude that Heaney's incitement for writing is at least
partly the idea of poetry as a language-based attempt to understand. The poet
delivers to us a generalized statement of what it is that needs to be understood
when he says that poetry makes “possible a fluid and restorative relationship
between the mind's centre and its circumference”21. That is to say, the human
being tries to undeck and apprehend the human Self, the world outside the Self,
and the interplay or reciprocal action between Self and world – just like the
child did when approaching wells.

To Handle a Spade

If we turn to Seamus Heaney's probably most famous poem – 'Digging' – we

find perception words in there, too, although it is probably less obviously
related to perceiving than 'Personal Helicon'. The poet hears the “clean rasping
sound”22 of a spade, he looks until he sees before his (inner) eye the image of
his father working23, and he senses the “smell of potato mould” 24. All of this
happens in his imagination obviously, since his father's use of the spade for
gardening purposes is an event recalled from memory – it happened twenty
years from the time of the poem25. This also means that in this poem, there is
no material soil the poet could be related to. Yet, his imagining of the events of

21 Ibid., p. 450.

22 'Digging', p. 3, s.2, l.1, in: Seamus Heaney. Opened Ground.

23 Cf. ibid., p. 3, from s.2, l.3 onwards.

24 Ibid., p. 4, s.7, l.2.

25 Which means if Heaney really recalls rather than making up an event, it happened in the mid-
1940s. This is, however, a random specification, for it does not tell us anything about the value of
the poem.

– — ›8‹ — ‒
his father working in the garden and of his grandfather cutting turf on the bog
can be understood to reveal (through memory and imagination) exactly this: the
poet's strong relation to the soil and the earth.
More important than this might be the digging metaphor. In the next-to-
last and in the last stanza Heaney seems to be very straight forward with its
use. He puts himself in one line with his grandfather and his father, thus
marking his connection to them – and to their actions as well. His difficulty
there is that he has “no spade to follow men like them” 26. He only has a pen of
which the usual purpose is that it is a tool used for writing. Writing naturally
happens in words which in turn are linked to thoughts. So when his grandfather
and father use spades to dig something up from the soil, it seems fair to say that
Heaney uses his pen to dig up what is to be found in the ground of the mind,
the sphere of the intellect and understanding. And as usual, he handles his pen
so very well that it becomes easy and well-nigh pleasant for the readers to
follow his imagination and conceive how well his ancestors must have handled
their spades.
They – Heaney's ancestors – cut into the Irish soil to get something out
of it, namely food and heating material. In a way, they also cut into the history
of Ireland because the ground is predestined to reveal things from the past (as
we will see shortly when having a look at 'Bogland'). Being reminiscent of his
father's and grandfather's past work, the poet digs not only into intellectual but
also into historical ground to arrive at his poetic findings and understandings.
Important in this respect are the “living roots”27, because they enable the
memory and and form the foundation from which Heaney can set out
imagining the family line and the connectedness of the various sorts of digging.
Thus this poem (and other Heaney poems as well) show us that things keep
coming from the ground and from the past; they reach into our present lives

26 Ibid., p. 4, s.7, l.1.

27 Ibid., p. 4, s.7, l.3.

– — ›9‹ — ‒
and can help us understand our being through finding an identity that connects
us to what has been28, an idea we will find in Marquard as well.

To Set Free From the Soil

In 'Bogland', Heaney strikes a similar chord to some extend. What the bog
reveals from under the turf and the peat is “the skeleton | Of the Great Irish
Elk”29. And the crusted surface of the bog has stashed away many more secrets
from the past, for example butter which is supposedly still edible after more
than a century30. So it is not only the big historical surprise of the elk that is
hidden in the ground. There are also small things there to be found – and to be
cherished and treasured, as everyone who ever had a chance to taste Irish butter
will know.
The skeleton is of course of great historical importance for naturalists
and historians, but the depiction of it as an “astounding crate full of air” 31 could
also be read as (maybe sarcastically) implying that this skeleton is a whole lot
of nothing in the sense that there are more important things lying under ground.
To get a better understanding of this, we have to have closer look at the activity
of cutting turf. The extraction of this combustible material usually happens by
taking away from the bog layer after layer of turf – just like Heaney describes
it: “Our pioneers keep striking | Inwards and downwards” 32. He continues in

28 This idea will be of great importance when we come to the philosophical considerations of Odo
Marquard.

29 'Bogland', p. 41f., s.3, l.1f., in: Seamus Heaney. Opened Ground.

30 Ibid.,cf. s.4, l.1-3.

31 Ibid., s.3, l.4.

32 Ibid., s.6, l.3f.

– — ›10‹ — ‒
stanza eight saying that “Every layer they strip | Seems camped on before” 33,
which means that whatever they set free is not only natural history as in the
case of the elk, but it is also the history and the stories of human civilizations; it
is thus in some way the poet's own extended history and also his genealogy, at
least possibly, which creates a nice link to the idea of ancestry present in
'Digging'. Wherever we start, it is not an absolute beginning; something has
always been there before – a thought that will be examined closer later on
when we turn to Odo Marquard.
Another interesting aspect to find in this poem – at least when we allow
ourselves a rather free and associative reading of it – is that the peat cutters do
not only excavate skeletons and edibles. The actual goal of their cutting,
namely: the turf, might also serve as an interesting object to think about. Turf is
actually sought for heating and cooking purposes, thus as fuel for fires which in
turn give us warmth – and they also give us light. Here we come full circle to
the idea of Enlightenment from 'Personal Helicon'. As chance would have it,
the two poems do not copy from one another in this respect, of course. Where
'Personal Helicon' displays a genuine quest for understanding, said
understanding happens as a by-product in 'Bogland'. It is the extraction of
combustibles that incidentally reveals nourishments and food for thought in the
form of historical matters that need to be explained and understood as well.
With every inch the peat cutters dig deeper into the ground another bit of the
history of the land and of its soil is revealed, so the idea of knowledge
acquisition is in some way present in 'Bogland', too.

33 Ibid., s.7, l.1f.

– — ›11‹ — ‒
Cruel Rites and Bog Bodies – Some Few Remarks

The soil, and what it reveals to the observer, are present in other Heaney poems
as well, for example in 'The Grauballe Man', 'Punishment', or 'The Tollund
Man', yet what we shall a very brief look at those poems, because it would
simply take too much time to get into detail there, and because we would need
to consider much more historical an political events than the framework of this
essay would allow for. An interesting and very fertile account of such an
undertaking can be found in Éamonn Ó Ciardha's paper about Eugene McCabe.
What the above mentioned poems have in common is that the historic
findings the soil reveals are the bog bodies of three people which are – in a
rather cruel sense of the word – human artefact. They have supposedly been
killed by their tribes, so the sort of knowledge revealed in these cases is not of
an enjoyable sort. Although historic, it shows what societies did to their
members back then, how they could harm their peers. Heaney links these
homicides with more recent events based on the conflicts between the two
Irelands34. For the most part, the poems are descriptive and imaginative and
commemorative (“perfected in my memory”35), but they also – quite subtly –
touch upon an ethical realm, probably not so much in terms of making an
explicit moral judgement, but rather in terms of more or less indirectly
appreciating a moral dimension to the issues, for example when – in
'Punishment' – talking about the young girl as a “scapegoat” 36 or about the two
girls from Northern Ireland as the bog mummy's “betraying sisters” 37 38
.

34 These conflicts are – and very fortunately so – on a good way towards being solved, however, they
were very present at for a long period of Seamus Heaney's life and continue to be present in some
of his poems. For other, and different, literary involvements with this matter, I allow myself to refer
the reader to Éamonn Ó Ciardha's excellent paper about Eugene McCabe.

35 'The Grauballe Man', p. 116, s.10, l.2, in: Seamus Heaney. Opened Ground.

36 'Punishment', p. 118, s.7, l. 4, in: Seamus Heaney. Opened Ground.

37 Ibid., s.10, l.2.

38 Moral language is less obvious in 'Tollund Man'. The “man-killing parishes” of Jutland can also be

– — ›12‹ — ‒
 Unfortunately, however much it would be interesting to think further
about this side of the three poems, we have to limit the scope of our topics.
Nevertheless, those three poems are a good example of how Mr. Heaney is able
in his poetry to reveal to us thoughts and insights, albeit personal and
subjective at least in part, from the past that he connects to the ground from
which the objects of those insights are ultimately excavated and revealed.

The Wisdom of the Fiddle Player

John Sheahan, who is well-known for having been the fiddle player with a
band called The Dubliners for almost five decades, has also written a
considerable amount of stirring and intriguing poems over the years. We are
usually taught in literary school to not confuse the narrator of a poem with the
poet himself. In the case of Heaney's and Sheahan's poetry, however, I think it
is safe to say that most of the time an “I” occurs, this personal pronoun refers to
the poet; at least so in the poems discussed in this rather lengthy think piece.
In 'Going to the Well'39, Mr. Sheahan describes how he goes “To a well
of wonder”40 with his uncle to fill their buckets with water. What I found
striking but nonetheless pleasing is the similarity to Heaney's 'Personal Helicon'
in the description of the well as a “Window into the ground, | Sky looking
up”41. There is no theme of understanding or the quest for knowledge there in

understood to be merely descriptive, for people have been killed there by their tribes for a variety of
reason; some might have been human sacrifice. Yet, in stanzas 7 and 8, Heaney describes whatever
cruel things the Irish might have done to their own people and that is of course where we as readers
might very well take a moral stance; cf. Heaney, Seamus. 'The Tollund Man', in: New Selected
Poems, p. 31.

39 'Going to the Well', p. 51, in: John Sheahan. Fiddle Dreams.

All of Sheahan's poems discussed here can be found in the appendix – just after the bibliography.

40 Ibid., s.2, l.5.

41 Ibid., s.3, l.1-2.

– — ›13‹ — ‒
the poem, just a delightful and alliterative description of the narrator following
his uncle to the well, filling up their gallons, and going back again. The
description of the well, however, ties in nicely, I think, with 'Personal Helicon',
for in both cases, the narrator looks into a mirroring surface of water – that
which is actually there – and sees (in Heaney's case in an intellectual sense, in
Sheahan's case in a very physical sense) what is there: in 'Personal Helicon' this
seeing is awareness of the Self, in 'Going to the Well' it is the sky which
physically speaking lies above and behind uncle Jimmy's nephew. In both
cases, the poets see something in front of and below them which is actually
there, but which is not physically present in the place they see it (which is, to
no surprise, the very nature of a mirror).
A very moderate, because child-orientated idea of understanding through
nature or soil can be found in 'My Father'. Sheahan's father, who worked for the
Garda in Dublin was “A rural exile”42 who moved to the capital of the
Republic. Although the family lived in the city (that is: “in a place called
Marion”43), the father, who is the narratee of the poem, is depicted as trying to
stay close to nature by working in the garden and “renewing your |
Acquaintance with the soil”44. To do that, he digs into the ground of the “urban
garden”45 while his son, who was born in Dublin, is “Discovering worms” 46.
This discovery of creatures that are not normally part of an urban area, we
might say, seems to be of great importance for the meaning of the poem, for it
makes for the final line. It marks the insight, we might assume, that the ground
the father ploughs, the ground that stands for a different, a non-urban world,

42 'My Father', p. 55, s.1, l.2, in: John Sheahan. Fiddle Dreams.

43 ...or so Mr. Sheahan says when introducing his song The Marino Waltz. He performed with The
Dubliners at Vicar Street during their 45 years anniversary tour.

44 'My Father', s.2, l.2-3.

45 Ibid., s.1, l.3.

46 Ibid., s.4, l.3.

– — ›14‹ — ‒
can be full of wonder and miracles and things that need to be discovered – and
together with that set a first step towards understanding of those miraculous
wonders of course.
Another poem in which Sheahan's father plays a role is 'The Turf Cutter'.
Before the father finally appears in the fourth stanza, the scene is slowly set
over three and a half stanzas and fourteen lines when Sheahan describes the
surface of the bog, hints at its usefulness for “Fire for winter's hearth” 47, calls
into play the tool shed from which – supposedly – the implements for turf
cutting are taken, and reminds us that turf cutters do not just start somewhere in
the bog. Similar to bricklaying their work, too, is a craft in need of accuracy
with a “Taut line pegged | Parallel to bank's edge”48.
What is of interest to us there is the parallel to Heaney's 'Bogland'. In
both poems, the turf cutters take something from the soil: heating material
which does not only gives us warmth and light, but which can also tell to the
living a story of times long gone. Although Sheahan only talks of the sheer
physical aspect of turf, of “releasing […] the energy | Of forgotten forests and
ancient suns”49, we might very well not take this as the absolute end of the
theme but think further and think beyond it – and that can lead us to a point
where we have been before: the point where we can say that it is not only a
geological or biological history that is revealed by slicing back the heather and
cutting into the soil; it is also a history (or rather: histories) of human beings, of
societies and groups that have lived in or near and made use of a bog place
before.
This is probably as far as we can get astray from 'The Turf Cutter'
without being unjust to the poem. Personally, I would not like to got so far as to
say that the fire as a result from “winter-warming harvest” 50 and the sun which
47 'The Turf Cutter', p. 65, s.1, l.4, in: John Sheahan. Fiddle Dreams.

48 Ibid., s.3, l.1-2.

49 Ibid., s.5, l.2-4.

50 Ibid., s.3, l.4.

– — ›15‹ — ‒
are both sources of warmth and of light constitute a hint at enlightenment,
some form of understanding or knowledge. This might very well come in when
we think further about the idea of history, but in the case of this poem, it would
probably be an over-interpretation saying that this idea is already in there,
whether explicit or implicit.
The theme of knowledge and understanding, however, is present in
another Sheahan poem: 'Quiet Wisdom'. Although it is a pretty straight forward
poem, I think it is quite important nevertheless for the lesson it can teach us.
John Sheahan is not only a poet but also a musician, who has been around the
world and has seen many places. Thus, contrary to his uncle Jim, he is not
“untravelled”51. Reading and listening to interviews with Mr. Sheahan (not least
to the wonderful RTÉ documentary John Sheahan – Dubliner52), one might
very well come to the conclusion that he is a very intelligent man and that on
his journeys he acquired a fair bit of knowledge and wisdom. Hence he is not –
in an intellectual way – “innocent” and “limited”53. He is not what at first he
thinks of his uncle.
Uncle Jim, on the other hand, spent most of his life on his farm
supposedly. He tells of only one occasion when he travelled to “Dublin once
for a match”54 and he prides himself with having made such a journey. At first,
the poet smiles “an inner secret smile”55, for he knows that this is actually not
much of a journey compared to the life of a professional and world-famous
musician. Then he sees himself “unravel”56 and recognizes all the things that

51 'Quiet Wisdom', p. 49, s.3, l.3, in: John Sheahan. Fiddle Dreams.

52 The full documentary can be found here: http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3cav7b.

53 'Quiet Wisdom', s.3, l.2

54 Ibid., s.1, l.2.

55 Ibid., s.3, l.1.

56 Ibid., s.3, l.4.

– — ›16‹ — ‒
his uncle, the farmer, knows and can do, all the knowledge his uncle posseses
about nature, animals, the crop, and agricultural necessities. To know about and
to understand the land and the soil we live on and live from is of great
importance, as Wendell Berry has pointed out, among other things, in his 2012
Jefferson Lecture It All Turns On Affection57. Barry reminds us that we can
learn from the land and let it help us understand who we are and where we
come from.
In 'Quiet Wisdom', the understanding of that importance comes in the
last three lines, when Sheahan recognizes his uncle's competences and
pronounces his decision to learn in his uncle's “university of fields” 58. This, I
think, makes the poem a poem about the importance of the connection to earth
and soil and nature. It is not so much the case that understanding comes
through nature (at least as far as the poem gets in telling a story), but it is rather
the case that it is about the understanding of the importance of nature. (So here,
again, nature and knowledge are closely linked together.) Yet, we might be
justified to assume that further knowledge and perception may happen through
nature, because Sheahan states that he will from now on (where “Now” 59 marks
the timely point of the initial insight or cognition) learn and thus most likely
understand things about nature (and, inferring from that, presumably things
about life and humanity, for nature undoubtedly makes for the foundation of
those).

57 The full lecture can be found here: http://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/wendell-e-

berry-lecture. In this lecture, Barry presents his arguments in such an intriguing way that I will not
try to retell them here; I could only remain far behind his masterful phrasing anyway.

58 Quiet Wisdom', s.6, l.2.

59 Ibid., s.6, l.1

– — ›17‹ — ‒
Turning to Propositions in Prose

We might have limited ourselves to only a few poems by Mr. Heaney and Mr.
Sheahan. The two poets, however, seem to care very little for limitations when
it comes to expressing themselves (and fortunately so, I may add). Whereas
John Sheahan composed tunes and played with many great musicians from all
over the world, Seamus Heaney expressed this thoughts not only in poetry, but
also in prose texts. This gives us the possibility to have a short look into some
of his prose from Finders Keepers before we will eventually turn to the
philosophy of Odo Marquard.
It comes as no surprise that Heaney wrote quite a few poems where his
interest in nature is brought to bear, for, as we can see not only in 'Crediting
Poetry' but also in 'Mossbawn', for example, he had a vivid curiosity for water
places and landscapes throughout his life: “To this day, green, wet corners,
flooded wastes, soft rushy bottoms, any place with the invitation of watery
ground and tundra vegetation […] possess an immediate and deeply peaceful
attraction”60. It seems that in this lines becomes visible an ingrained trust in
such places, or, as Heaney said two pages earlier: “All children want to crouch
in their secret nests”61. By extension, this might not only be true for children,
but for adults, too, as we will soon see when turning to philosophy.
A secret nest – if frequented regularly – can become a place or token in
which the child can put his62 trust, a place that stays more or less the same,
because since it is unknown to anybody else, nobody can change it. So
whenever the child comes to his secret, he finds something steady, something
continuous, something persistent – and that seems to be an important feature of

60 'Mossbawn', p. 5, in: Seamus Heaney. Finders Keepers.

61 Ibid., p. 3.

62 For simplicity's sake (because I assumed that the child in 'Personal Helicon' is a boy) and because
'Mossbawn' seems to be a somewhat autobiographical essay, as Mr. Heaney himself says in the
Preface (cf. Finders Keepers, p.x), I use the male pronoun here.

– — ›18‹ — ‒
humans or things we put our trust in.
This continuity, this stability is dearly needed in times when change
seems to happen ever more rapidly and ever more encompassing. Thus
continuity becomes a counter-reality to change, we might say. Although the
adult knows that the child's secret nest is not the absolute safe place the child
seems to perceive it as, it is important that the child has such a perception or
imagination, for this is precisely what makes for the image of persistence from
which trust and hence the idea of a counter-reality can rise. Heaney finds this
idea in poetry, too, in his essay 'The Redress of Poetry' when he writes that

“in the activity of poetry too, there is a tendency to place a counter-reality

in the scales – a reality which may be only imagined but which
nevertheless has weight because it I imagined within the gravitational pull
of the actual and can therefore hold its own and balance out against the
historical situation. This redressing effect of poetry comes from its being a
glimpsed alternative, a revelation of potential that is denied or constantly
threatened by circumstances”63.

The child in the secret nest understands the potential of that nest as a trusty and
safe space and thus redresses the reality of the place which says that the place
is as safe or fragile as any other place. It is the intellectual action of redressing
(which in this case may come without the explicit understanding of the full
nature of his hideout on the child's side) which brings us to the philosophy of
Odo Marquard. As Heaney mentions just a few lines after the above quote, a
redress can mean a “compensation for”64 something, amongst other things.

63 'The Redress of Poetry', p. 259, in: Seamus Heaney. Finders Keepers.

64 Ibid., p. 260.

– — ›19‹ — ‒
Leading a Life Attached to Histories

The idea of compensation finds is echo in the corpus of Marquard, but not only
that: it is a – if not the – central idea and headstone for the philosopher's theory
and his hermeneutical approach to the world. According to Marquard,
hermeneutics is the answer to the question of human finiteness; this is his basic
assumption65. For one thing, this assumption seems to be of a timely nature.
Then again, it also seems to function on a anthropological level. Either way,
Marquard's thesis needs elucidation.
Human beings are finite beings. They are limited in the existence by
their birth, which is their most inevitable past, and by their death, which is their
most inevitable future. On the anthropological level we find that by being
aware of this, humans are defined as beings which know about their finiteness
and which have to deal with their lifetime with this knowledge in mind. We are
always terminally limited by the shortness of our lives, whereas shortness
needs to be understood as the relation of the time we actually have to the time
we would need to do anything possible. Yet, we do not have as much time as
we want to do anything that is possible. Instead, we are only able to do some
things. This is the timely framework under which humans can operate, that is:
live their lives66.
Since the above described circumstances are unalterable, we have to find
a way to make sense of our lives and ourselves. An appropriate way to deal
with the above findings Marquard suggests is that we should live a
conventional, an attaching life, i. e., a life guided by our derivation or origin.
This means that our past, our history (or rather: histories) may serve as a
foundation of understanding for our life67. The past, however, is more than just
65 Cf. 'Frage nach der Frage, auf die die Hermeneutik die Antwort ist', p. 119, in: Odo Marquard.
Abschied vom Prinzipiellen.

66 Cf. ibid., p. 120.

67 Cf. ibid.

– — ›20‹ — ‒
our own timely history since our birth; the past is everything that happened
historically and that gets conceived by us individually. Through this grasping
we are shaped by the past in one way or another; the past becomes our past
amongst other thing, because we participate in it through our knowledge of it.
This shows, too, that our individual beginning, our birth, is never the
actual beginning of existence, for something has always been there before we
are there – a thought that we have come across in 'Bogland' already.
Now, hermeneutics is the “doctrine of understanding” 68 and is about the
very exploration “of human life and existence as such”69. Thus Marquard's idea
of interpreting our life and our past. Yet, we cannot interpret and understand
our past all on our own; sometimes we need help to do that, the help of people
which have been there before us, which accompany our life, and which – with
recourse to their own lives – can explain things in our past in a way that we can
make sense of. Such people could be our parents or grandparents, but also
artists, for example. The problem with people is that they are – virtually by
definition – human beings and hence are timely limited. They will eventually
die and maybe they will die before they were able to help us make sense of our
life. This is why it can be difficult sometimes to understand our past in its
entirety. That is to say: our past can slip away from our grasp and vanish into
incomprehensibility; Marquard calls this impermanence70.
A culture of preservation and remembrance is what can be of help
against impermanence and this help might come from museums, from the
creation of art, or from the humanities, for example. Those might not be an
absolute remedy against impermanence, but they aid us anyway in our attempt
to understand. Let us assume we have some artefact or issue that we want to
make sense of, some token we want to understand. Even if – through
68 Matthias Jung. Hermeneutik zur Einführung, p. 7.

69 cf. Ramberg and Gjesdal, introduction of Hermeneutics, in: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

70 'Frage nach der Frage, auf die die Hermeneutik die Antwort ist', p. 122.
Impermanence is in italics in the source text, too, and translates with 'Vergänglichkeit'.

– — ›21‹ — ‒
impermanence – we lose the original meaning of that token, our ability to
interpret it can help us discover a new or secondary meaning. The initial sense
of a story or history might get lost for real every now and then, but a new
meaning can be discovered through interpretation where the old or original
meaning slips away and into the opaque or incomprehensible.
This, I think, holds water, too, in cases where we do not even know if
something has an original or a secondary meaning. If we do not know what the
Irish and Northern Irish and English conflict from the mid to the late 20th
century was about, the short stories of Eugene McCabe can help us make sense
of the term 'Troubles'. It is, of course, only the meaning that we get through the
reading-glass of one single author, and, as Éamonn Ó Ciardha shows by
consulting a range of secondary works on this topic, a lot of different fine-
grained opinions and interpretations exist in that case. We might have never
been part of the Troubles, we do not know the phenomenology of what it is like
to participate (actively or passively) in the Troubles. Yet, we have arrived at
some understanding, even if this understand might leave room for
improvement. This would then be a secondary meaning; in the above case it
would also be a first step towards a fuller and more comprehensive
understanding of the Troubles.
Art and the humanities can not only help us to understand something,
they can also help to bear something, for example, the speed of change in this
world and the being new of so many things we become acquainted with day by
day. This endurance, one might argue, happens through an iron ration of
confidence in something that is precisely not new, because it has been there and
has been with us for a while: a bit of the past that we are. In the case of a child,
this can very well be the secret nest, for example. Marquard writes that children
“carry their iron ration of confidante around with them all of the time: their
teddy bears. Children compensate their deficit of familiarness with a permanent
presence of the confidante”71. This goes for adults as well. Although the world
71 'Zukunft braucht Herkunft', p. 72; my translation, in: Odo Marquard. Philosophie des Stattdessen.

– — ›22‹ — ‒
is not as new and as little familiar to adults as it is to children, adults, too, need
familiarity. For that reason, we carry our personal classics with us: we make it
through our literary studies with the poetry of Seamus Heaney, Jamilia Woods,
or Basil Bunting; we get through the year with the music of The Dubliners,
Tina Dico, or Mark Knopfler. Freudian psychoanalysis labels such familiarities
'transitional objects'72, but it is probably not so important how to name them. It
seems to be more important to understand their use and function for our lives:
they help us to tie in with and make sense of our past, our histories and by
doing so to find our place in life. This is why history and historical artefacts,
but also art, which can have histories and stories as its subjects, are of such
great importance.
I think it is quite telling that not only in the case of art, but also in the
case of teddy bears, the familiarity is – or at least can be – displayed through
objects of nature. The teddy is an imitation of a real animal, and if children do
not find a hollow tree or a real cave to make it their secret nest, they use
pillows and other living room or bedroom items to build caves and castles to
hide and play there and by doing so exclude the strange and unfamiliar outside
world. This possibility of retreat allows them to discover their strength again
and to find themselves again if something new got them confused, for example.
When they are done playing, they are ready to face more of the new world
outside the secret nest, to explore, discover, and explain the world perceived –
just like the boy did with the wells.
It might be similar in the case of adults: if we have assured ourselves
that the dotted line the ashplant made on Sandymount Strand has still not been
washed away by the tide73, if we have convinced ourselves that the drawer is
filled again with tight dark fists74, we are certain of our supply of familiarity

72 Cf. 'Zeit und Endlichkeit', p. 52, in: Odo Marquard. Skepsis und Zustimmung.

73 Cf. 'The Strand', p. 436, in: Seamus Heaney. Opened Ground.

74 Cf. 'The Socks', p. 33, in: Jane Kenyon. Collected Poems.

– — ›23‹ — ‒
and are fit to face the world again; which also means: to be ready to try to
understand that world we perceive of. And this is just what poetry can give us
amongst other things: a bit of familiarity and continuity in an ever changing
world. Compensation – or redress, as Heaney calls it – can make for a culture
of continuity expressed in poetry (and in other forms of artistic expression).
Nature, in that case, becomes not only the occasional object of the artwork. It is
also revealed through history as the basis of human existence, for it is in and on
nature that human lives existed, as the pioneers of the bog dig out. The second
aspect of nature is that it can preserve nourishment; its third aspect is that it can
lead to self-awareness or awareness of other things and tokens that exist
(through mirroring surfaces, for example).

Finale: Fragmentation, Not Trivialisation

There seems to be a convergence in the oeuvres of Seamus Heaney, John

Sheahan, and Odo Marquard, a convergence that could almost let us ignore an
important piece to the puzzle of Marquard's philosophy which has gone
unmentioned until now. To understand the convergence, we will first need to
consider that piece. I have presented here a picture of Marquard that has him
focus on the past. One could infer from this that there is no room for the future
in his Theory of Compensation. Such a though would simply be wrong though.
I will now give a subsequent filling I did not present earlier, for I did not want
to overcomplicate matters.
Let us recapitulate: humans are finite beings and they never start at an
absolute beginning – something has always been there before. Their finiteness
disenables them to do everything they want to, thus their scope of possible
actions is limited. To figure out how much they can do, which changes they can

– — ›24‹ — ‒
possibly bring about, they ought to orientate themselves towards the past. This
move enables them to better understand and handle their lives; Marquard's
theory in a nutshell – at least what we have seen of it so far. To put it in his own
words:

“We simply do not have the time to arrange everything or at least most
things anew in our lives; we simply do not have the time to escape as far
as we wish from our derivation through change and amendment of our
ways of life. For our death is ever faster than most of our changes”75.

This quote reveals that the idea of the future does not experience denial, but it
shows that the future can only be brought about and can only be shaped by
humans (insofar as this is possible at all) with recourse to the past. This, I
suppose, is a point of convergence the philosopher shares with the poets: the
works we have reviewed here do not deny the possibility of future, yet they call
into memory the importance of

a) the past by focussing on history, by focussing on telling stories of

things that have been or might have been, personal and public, big
and small, pleasant and ghastly;

b) through this telling of stories, they also converge on the line of

continuity, even though not in their content, but in the effect they
have: they offer ongoing consolation, orientation, and hints as to
how to interpret the lives we lead;

c) along with this continuity, I, personally, often experience a sort of

familiar feeling not only when I go back and re-read poems or

75 'Zukunft braucht Herkunft, p. 70; my translation.

– — ›25‹ — ‒
 texts I already know; with new works, too, I seem to experience
this familiarity in a theme or a tune or a particular and reoccurring
choice of words or a certain take on things Heaney, Sheahan, and
Marquard seem to have;

d) the interpreting effect which comes with continuity is of course the

attempt to discover or rediscover, and explain the world – whether
to an audience or reader, or to the scholars themselves;

e) I allow myself to add another personal remark to this list which consists
in the non-uproariness I find in the works of said scholars. Their
writings are moderate and although sometimes striking, they never
hit the readers. The authors take us gently by our hand and guide
us through whatever it is they have to say.

How, one might ask, is it possible that three people who started as a literary
scholar and teacher, a musician, and a self-proclaimed academic wastrel who
became one of the foremost philosophers of post-war Germany expose such an
immense overlap? One possible answer might be that their works really “set
the darkness echoing”76 in the sense that they help us understand the life we are
confronted with. This idea seems to gesture at the value their works give the
generous reader. But is it not the case that a philatelist finds comparable value
in collecting stamps, for in that action there is no uproar, but continuity and
consolation, too? One could certainly make that point, I think, but it would not
trivialise or depreciate poetry and philosophy. It might rather valorize
collecting stamps precisely because one could, if one would show such an
inclination, find in collecting stamps what I – and others – find in poetry and
philosophy: something stable, something to hold on to, something to connect

76 'Personal Helicon', s.5, l.4.

– — ›26‹ — ‒
stories to: something genuinely meaningful. There can certainly be arguments
of ranking the values of certain activities or pleasures 77, but I will not go into
those. For my present purposes, it must suffice to point out that value and
meaning persist in activities which seem to be far from each other at first sight,
such as intellectual enjoyment on the one hand and seemingly trivial activities
on the other. Either way, this considerations show that there might not be the
one value, but that value is a plurality, so to say, fragmented and spread out
over different objects of appreciation.
Following up on the idea of fragmentation we find it is not explicitly
present in the works discussed here, but nevertheless of some importance, for it
can be understood to be implicit in the circumference of the poems and essays.
They tell stories or present a history which dates back to times before our three
authors wrote those texts. Through being picked up and remembered in texts,
we might say, the stories continue to remain present even after the creative acts
of writing, that is: they are present in some future. Thus the poems (and
Marquard's philosophical essays, too) have a beginning which lies in a time and
matter before them and which reaches far beyond them in one way or another.
It is this thought that shall mark the end of my congeries of think pieces which
started with a poem by Seamus Heaney and which shall end with the final lines
of his poem 'Fragment'78:

“'Since when,' he asked,

'Are the first line and last line of any poem
Where the poem begins and ends?'”

77 A most prominent example for this could be John Stuart Mill's differentiation of the pig satisfied
and Socrates dissatisfied. For a discussion of similar examples see: Krister Bykvist. Utilitarianism.

78 The Fragment', p. 57, s.2, l.5-7, in: Seamus Heaney. Electric Light.

– — ›27‹ — ‒
Bibliography

Textual Material:

Berry, Wendell. It All Turns On Affection. 2012 Jefferson Lecture, available at:
http://www.neh.gov/about/awards/jefferson-lecture/wendell-e-berry-lecture,
accessed on 11th Dec. 2015.

Bykvist, Krister. Utilitarianism: A Guide For the Perplexed, 2nd edition. Berlin:
Walter de Gruyter, 2007.

Heaney, Seamus. New Selected Poems, 1966-1987. London: Faber and Faber,
1990.

Heaney, Seamus. Opened Ground, Poems 1966-1996. London: Faber and

Faber, 1998.

Heaney, Seamus. Electric Light. London: Faber and Faber, 2001.

Heaney, Seamus. Finders Keepers, Selected Prose 1971-2001. London: Faber

and Faber, 2002.

Jung, Matthias. Hermeneutik zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius Verlag, 2001.

Kenyon, Jane. Collected Poems. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf Press, 2005.

Marquard, Odo. Skepsis und Zustimmung. Philosophische Studien. Stuttgart:

Reclam, 1995.

– — ›28‹ — ‒
Marquard, Odo. Philosophie des Stattdessen. Studien. Stuttgart: Reclam, 2009.

Marquard, Odo. Abschied vom Prinzipiellen. Philosophische Studien. Stuttgart:

Reclam, 2010.

Ramberg, Bjørn and Kristin Gjesdal. Hermeneutics, in: Zalta, Edward (ed.).
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2014 Edition), available at:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hermeneutics/, accessed on 5th Dec. 2015.

Sheahan, John. Fiddle Dreams. Poems & Lyrics. Dublin: Dedalus Press, 2015.

Video and Sound Material:

Sheahan, John/The Dubliners. 'The Marino Waltz', on: The Dubliners In

Dublin. All The Great Songs Live. CD 2, track 08. Pinorrekk Records:
Hamburg, 2007.

Sheahan, John. John Sheahan – Dubliner. RTÉ Arts documentary, available at:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3cav7b, accessed on 12th Dec. 2015.

– — ›29‹ — ‒
Appendix

Quiet Wisdom (p. 49, Fiddle Dreams)

for Uncle Jim

“Have you travelled much, Uncle Jim?”

“I was in Dublin once for a match,”
He said proudly with a grin.
“An All-Ireland Final, in Croke Park.”

“And I stayed in Murphy's B&B

In Jones's Road.
I suppose you know Mrs. Murphy,”
He remarked.

I smiled an inner secret smile.

How innocent, how limited,
How untravelled, I thought.
And then I saw myself unravel.

I can't milk a cow, or plough a furrow,

Or tell when corn I ripe for the scythe,
Or tell a robin from a sparrow,
Or tell which songbird sings on high,
Or tell the elm from the ash
Or tell the weather from the signs
Known to the farmer.

But he can!

Now I learn from hi quiet wisdom

In his university of fields.

– — ›30‹ — ‒
Going to the Well (p. 51, Fiddle Dreams)
with Uncle Jimmy

Your giant stride leads the way;

Idle swing of empty buckets
Creaking rusty music;
My tin gallon cans in harmony.

Ancient stepping stones across the field …

Scattered notes of a lost tune
Waiting for a cancer …
My nimble feet match their random rhythm
To a well of wonder.

Window into the ground,

Sky looking up,
Tilted vessels swallow their shadows
in gulps.

Brimming buckets buckle and belly,

Heaving sights of metal fatigue;
Sundance on restless ripples …
Dappled gold on cheek and chin …

We straighten to balance our burden –

Scales of justice zig-zagging homeward;
Twin trails of silver jewels, our signatures,
Glistening through the summer dust.

– — ›31‹ — ‒
My Father (p. 55, Fiddle Dreams)

I see you now …

A rural exile
In an urban garden,

Your broad back bent

To the spade, renewing your
Acquaintance with the soil.

I see well-worn tools

That knew your father's hand,
Coaxing clods of unwilling clay.

You are a giant

Peeling off the world's overcoat,
And I, a child of the city,
Discovering worms.

The Turf Cutter (p. 65, Fiddle Dreams).

Purple-tufted, mossy underlay,

ancient carpet of the bog,
Crowning banks of fossil fuel,
Fire for winter's hearth.

Corrugated-iron shed,
Yawn of creaking, unlocked door
Awakens rusting tools
From idle slumber.

– — ›32‹ — ‒
Taut line pegged
Parallel to bank's edge
Sets the target
For winter-warming harvest.

Rusty bluntness
Rasped to steely gleam.
Heathery carpet sliced back,
Ready for my father's sleán

To cut through a millennium

Of growth and decay, releasing
To a new generation the energy
Of forgotten forests and ancient suns.

– — ›33‹ — ‒