I thought this poem was particularly interesting,because it again dealt with the issue of what the role of a poet is. Should he be actively involved in the political ordeals and the violence that Northern Ireland was submerged in?
The first stanza immediately tells us that he is talking about the troubles that northern Ireland, “that was a time when the times were also in spasm”. And here again, Heaney makes clear that he believes that the poet should distance himself, because although he feels he was involved and did address in the political drama and all the violence that was going on, (he was “mired in attachment”), the people around him felt that he should be more active, like a Lorca figure, as he mentions in “Singing School”. That they want him to do more, or at least that he felt that the people wanted him to do more becomes clear when he says “they began to pronounce me a feeder off battlefield”.
And he did flee from this, “so I mastered new rungs of the air to survey out of reach”, which then also reminds us of his inherent feeling of always being an outsider observing and commenting on what’s going on in the group that he feels he cannot be part of, he will always be ‘an inner émigré’. However, although he escaped by making his ‘first flight’, it is interesting to note that Heaney does not feel threatened or put down by the people’s response. He uses these critics to his advantage and grows stronger as a poet from them, for he says; “the onslaught of winds I would welcome and climb at the top of my bent”.
I grew up listening to traditional Irish ballads, many of which are a rather disturbing example of romanticizing Irish martyrdom and suicidal revolutionary activities. Examine three stanzas from my childhood favorite, Boolavogue, which tells the story of the Irish Rebellion of 1798:
“Then Father Murphy from old Kilcormack/ Spurred up the rocks with a warning cry:/ ‘Arm, arm!’ he cried ‘For I’ve come to lead you;/ For Ireland’s freedom we fight or die’
…
“At Vinegar Hill, over the pleasant Slaney/ Our heroes vainly stood back to back/ And the Yeos at Tullow took Father Murphy/ And burnt his body upon the rack
“God grant you glory, brave Father Murphy/ And open heaven to all your men/ The cause that called you may call tomorrow/ In another fight for the Green again”
To give some context to the ballad’s lyrics, a priest (Father Murphy) leads a charge of Irish rebels against the onslaught of the English Yeomen (soldiers). The rebellion was sure to fail: the French, supposed to come to Ireland’s aid, had failed to land on the coast due to poor conditions; informants had warned the British of the rebellion and most of the leadership had been rounded up. The British, as a matter of policy, massacred any rebels. The rebellion that so romantically promises eternal glory to Father Murphy’s men is essentially a suicide mission.
This is the same kind of disturbing Romanticism that appears in Yeats’ “Cathleen ni Houlihan”, and it is this sort of thing which made Yeats wonder if his writing caused men to go out and get shot. Romanticism applied to violence and war often falls apart in the face of harsh reality. Americans learned this lesson with the introduction of televised warfare during the Vietnam War: it was easy to view WWII are heroic and glorious, but it was harder to take that view of a war in which you could turn on your television and watch men’s heads being blown off.
This, I believe, is Heaney’s reaction to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Heaney looks at the hosts of Irish who have died for Ireland, from the ancient Bog Bodies, to the medieval and early modern rebellions against the British Crown, to the Easter Rising, to the Troubles. He examines the romanticizing of the death and gore, and is deeply disturbed by the harsh reality of public bombings and paramilitary operations.
Contrast the lyrics to Boolavogue with Heaney’s poem, “Requiem for the Croppies”, also about the 1798 Rebellion and written on the 50th anniversary of the Easter Rising:
The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley…
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp…
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people hardly marching… on the hike…
We found new tactics happening each day:
We’d cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until… on Vinegar Hill… the final conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August… the barley grew up out of our grave.
The line “they buried us without shroud or coffin” seems to undercut any would-be heroism of the act: the “terraced thousands died”, the hillside “soaked in our broken wave” of blood, and the men were buried without ceremony or honor. The agency is not given to the men: Heaney does not write “we fought and died for Ireland”; he describes the very land of Ireland soaking up the rebels’ blood and spitting out barley in its place. Death is part of the natural cycle in Ireland, and we see again Heaney’s familiar image of the bloodthirsty land that needs to be fed by dead bodies of Irish men. This is the same image present in Heaney’s Bog Bodies poems: the peat bogs take in the dead bodies, and accept their sacrifice, and years later men like Heaney’s father cut the peat from the bog.
…and to conclude a rather somber post, here’s a beautiful rendition of Boolavogue by Anthony Kearns. Not as rustic as some more authentic versions, but still a really nice song, and the operatic style really draws attention to the romantic subject matter. 🙂
During the time when Seamus Heaney was writing, there was great political turmoil in Northern Ireland. Beginning in the 1960’s, the Troubles were a conflict between those in Northern Ireland who wanted to remain loyal to Britain (Loyalists, who were mainly Protestants) and those who wanted to be a separate entity from Britain (Nationalists, who were mainly Catholic). This was a time of militant violence and fear among both parties, as attacks were prevalent and deadly. Despite Heaney being a Catholic from Northern Ireland his poetry doesn’t really delve into this political realm until the publication of North in 1975.
Though the main issues from the Troubles are mostly in the past, connections to them in popular culture still exist. Despite it being a traumatic event, it is a major part of Northern Irish history. The American Celtic punk band Flogging Molly writes music that connects to Ireland and their history. Their album Drunken Lullabies features two songs that can be directly connected to the Troubles and some of the imagery and themes that can be found in Heaney’s poems from North.
Gusty Spence seems to me to be the first person who actually got that there is no such thing as the ‘essential Ireland’ as Heaney alludes to in his poem “The Stations of the West” when he says “I had come west to inhale the absolute weather”. There is nothing that is inherently there and only to be found by a certain group of people, in this case either Protestants or Catholics. Spence is then also the first one, who as David Ervine says, will try and organize a peace treaty.
It can therefore be said that he is the first one that realizes that there are not ‘essential’ differences between Protestants and Catholics that cannot be overcome and make them inherent enemies of each other. It reminded me a lot of the two men in Heaney’s poem “Trial Runs” who are able to joke about each other religion. “’Did they make a Papish of you over there?’ ‘Oh damn the fear! I stole them for you, Paddy, off the Pope’s dresser when his back was turned.’”
This whole view of Spence being seen as one of the rare members of the UVF and IRA who finally was able to focus on the things they had in common instead of the difference, can be supported by the fact that this poem is included in Stations, which was released in 1975, only two years after Spence had convinced the leaders of the UVF to temporarily cease fire, ending the violence for at least a little while.
This is of course a highly debatable view, and I would like to know what you think and if you think this is even a slightly justifiable argument.
I was perplexed by the frequent shifts in tone of Heaney’s poem, “Oysters,” and the contrast between the luxury of eating them and his description of the rigorous processes that allow him such privilege. The opening stanza creates a euphoric tone indicating the richness of the oysters, but shifts abruptly to the harsh process of collecting them. Throughout the poem, Heaney paints an increasingly harsh picture of the logistics of the oysters’ delivery while he enjoys the delicacy in a detached state from the process.
The metaphor represents the harsh social and political conditions being faced by those living in Northern Ireland during the 1970’s, a time of violence and hardship. Heaney indirectly describes the state of Northern Ireland and its occupants through the oysters as “ripped and shucked and scattered,” due to the “philandering” of the British military and increasing violence in the area during the peak of Protestant and Catholic tensions. Heaney’s portrayal of himself in this poem recognizes his position of privilege, but displays his understanding of his position as a poet in the midst of a chaotic uprising that ultimately fuels his writing. I would imagine that this adheres to Heaney’s ambivalence in his sense of belonging. Though he tries not to engage the situation radically, one can see his sense of responsibility to comment on the events unfolding as a leading voice in Irish culture. I can’t tell for certain if he feels guilty for his position of privilege from the poem. He “toasts friendship” over oysters acquired through conflict, but what does that mean if the conflict is that of Northern Ireland? It may fuel his writing, but clearly Heaney wouldn’t ask for any of that. It seems to suggest that by understanding the conflict that feeds him his material he has a responsibility to make sense of it, in his case, by turning it into artful poetry. This idea appears true in the final line, in which the conflict “quickens [Heaney] into verb,” or writing.
The documentary we saw in class didn’t say much about Bernadette Devlin, the Catholic civil rights activist in Northern Ireland who was a major political opponent to Ian Paisley. I was curious about her role in the Troubles, and I found that as a member UK parliament from 1969 to 1974 she helped to form a slightly more moderate political party and militant group from Sinn Fein and the IRA. However, she brazenly supported the blanket protest, dirty protest and hunger strikes. These sympathies won her dangerous enemies, and in 1981 the UVF tried to kill Devlin and her husband in their home. Heany, as a Catholic in Northern Ireland, undoubtedly knew that his poems would be scrutinized for the same sympathies as Devlin’s and by the same enemies. What happened to Devlin over her life (she’s 66 now) really drives home for me the level of personal danger that came with getting involved in Northern Irish politics at the time, and may partly explain why Heany was so slow to touch such issues.
I read that on January 16, 1981, three men broke into Devlin’s house in Ulster, Northern Ireland, and shot her and her husband in front of their children. The shooters somehow got past the British troops stationed as guards around her house and kicked in the door, but were promptly arrested upon exiting the house after the shooting was done. The implications are that the British troops were in league with the shooters, sent by the UFF (Ulster Freedom Fighters, the militant branch of the UVF) and agreed to arrest them after Devlin and her husband were killed. This interview is from 1982, a year after the attack. The chillingly detached way with which Devlin talks about her injuries and the suspicious failure of the British guards to stop the gunmen speaks her devotion to her cause, and her acceptance that her opposition to Loyalists like Ian Paisley makes her an enemy of the British. A warning, the quiet, 4 minute interview may be disturbing to watch.
I was looking for more information on Jean McConville, one of 17 people that “disappeared” because of the IRA. Apparently, there is a documentary about this group, titled “Disappeared” but I couldn’t find it online, only reviews/overviews. What I did find, was an article from The Telegraph about a man, Ivor Bell, currently being charged with the murder of Jean McConville in December 1972. This is the link: http://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/sunday-life/news/gerry-adams-youre-next-jean-mcconvilles-daughter-tells-sinn-fein-president-hell-follow-ira-veteran-ivor-bell-to-dock-30118353.html
This second link is a description of the night Jean was taken by IRA members, according to Agnes, one of Jean’s children.
This list consists of a few (of so many!) pop culture–and not-so-pop-culture, but notable!– references to W.B. Yeats. I began by merging together some existing lists I found online, and when verifying those references or searching for related images, videos, and links I would often stumble upon other Yeats references. This list is by no means complete, but is a decent start at chronicling the seemingly endless references to William Butler Yeats and his poetry.
X-Men: Legacy #23 – “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” released by Marvel (March 2014)
“When You Are Old” Manga by julian peters comics (2012)
Peters has several adaptations of classic poems including Yeats’s “When You are Old.”
If you click on the link to see the full comic you’ll see that Peters has depicted Yeats himself as Love (the external Yeatsian “being” that has fled and “hid his face amid a crowd of stars.”) Contrast this to Yeats’s notion that emotions, like love, are external beings (a sort of “demon”) that could come and go as it pleased. Peters’s adaptation suggests perhaps there is more will involved than Yeats believed.
Kevin Smith’s Batman: The Widening Gyre, DC Comics (August 2009 through July 2010)
**Spoiler alert for those who care…**
Batman: The Widening Gyre is a limited six-issue comic book series written by Kevin Smith and illustrated by Walt Flanagan. The series is a continuation of Smith’s 3-issue limited series Batman: Cacophony, the first of Smith’s Onomatopoeia trilogy. Batman Bellicosity, due in 2014 (?) will conclude the trilogy.
Issue #1 (pictured above) begins in a Jewish temple in Gotham City. Baron Blitzkrieg has teamed up with the Atomic Skull to attempt to destroy Torah Scrolls dating back to 1878 that had been smuggled out of Berlin shortly after Kristallnacht. After Batman, Robin, and Nightwing defeat Blitzkrieg and Atomic Skull, Batman heads off to Arkham Asylum to discover it completely overgrown with vegetation. Poison Ivy has turned Arkham into a fortress to protect herself from the anti-hero, Etrigan the Demon. Batman and Etrigan battle and just as it looks like Etrigan is about to strike the final blow another masked figure appears clad in black with a silver cape, donning a demon-like mask resembling a goat head and saves Batman.
So, what does this all have to do with Yeats?
Obviously The Widening Gyre is a reference to Yeats’s poem “The Second Coming.” The cover of issue #1 depicts a chaotic arrangement of satanic symbols, perhaps referencing the “mere anarchy” about to be “loosed upon [Gotham City]” and the coming of the rough beast.
While the beginning of the first issue seemingly has little to do with one of the main plots of the series–Batman’s encounters with the mysterious new vigilante who Batman eventually begins to consider as his possible replacement–it is interesting that the series should open in a Temple with Baron Blitzkrieg attempting to destroy the Scrolls. “The Second Coming” was published shortly after the end of WWI and with the aftermath of the war fresh in Yeats’s memory, he produced an apocalyptic poem reminiscent of the violence that dominated the world at this time. It seems appropriate then for Smith to begin his series with the villain Baron Blitzkrieg and his Neo-Nazi ring. Just as Germany seemed to be ushering in a new antithetical era with the violence of WWI, Baron Blitzkrieg sets up what will perhaps be Gotham City’s antithetical era–complete with a new hero.
Besides Baron Blitzkrieg and the Atomic Skull, Batman confronts “A gallery of [his] failures” in Arkham Asylum: The Mad Hatter, Tweedledum, The Riddler, Two-Face, and The Joker locked away in their cells which are being overgrown with plant life thanks to Poison Ivy. It is in these frames where “The ceremony of innocence is drowned”; where the people of Gotham see victories, “Batman’s Trophy Case”, Batman himself sees “a pageant of [his] shortcomings.” The reader is given the feeling that, surely, this center cannot hold…
This, however, is only the beginning of the series. Issue #1 ends with a mysterious masked figure who comes to Batman’s rescue and later identifies himself as “Baphomet.”
Baphomet appears again in part two: “The Falconer” when Batman has to choose between capturing a villain or saving a child. Batman, being as predictable as he is, obviously opts to save the child and fears he has let the villain escape. To his surprise, however, Baphomet has already captured the villain and turned him over to the cops while Batman was saving the little girl.
It’s unclear who, in this issue, “The Falconer” is supposed to be…Batman, I suppose? And is Baphomet now supposed to be the falcon that cannot hear? At the end Batman is knocked out by Cornelius Stirk and is left unconscious until the third issue, “Things Fall Apart.” It’s also possible that at this point Kevin Smith is just picking random lines from the poem to title each part of the series. I tried searching for interviews with Kevin about why he chose a Yeats poem to refer to in this series, but with no luck.
*Edit* Smith actually is just going line by line in the poem as he titles each issue:
#1: “Turning and Turning”
#2: “The Falconer”
#3: “Things Fall Apart”
#4: “The Centre Cannot Hold”
#5: “Mere Anarchy”
#6: “The Blood-Dimmed Tide is Loosed”
Given the events in each part it doesn’t seem that Kevin had “The Second Coming” in mind the entire time he was writing the series–except for the fact that Baphomet himself may turn out to be the “rough beast, its hour come round at last…” Besides the ending, which I refuse to give away because it is THAT good, “The Widening Gyre” shifts away from the poem as Baphomet continues to pique Batman’s interest and Batman’s relationship with Silver St. Cloud (a former love interest) develops. I will say that the ending of “The Widening Gyre” lines up again with the poem in that it may prove to be apocalyptic, both to Gotham City and to Batman himself. Unfortunately, Kevin Smith answers to no one, even DC, when it comes to deadlines and we may have to wait until 2025 for this Second Coming.
Vice President Biden to the European Parliament, “Easter Sunday, 1916” (2010)
If you are really that interested in hearing Biden quote Yeats you can hear him read a line from “Easter Sunday, 1916” about 48 seconds into the clip. I feel like he doesn’t understand the context of the poem…at all.
Star Trek: Mere Anarchy, which originally began as a series of e-books, is a six book epic covering thirty years of Star Trek history. Each novella was written by a different author and is now available as a single-volume, trade paperback. The titles of each individual novella are also taken from “The Second Coming.”
“Slouching Towards Bethlehem” by Robert James (2008)
The title to the album references “The Second Coming”
Bright Eyes “Four Winds” (2007)
Your class, your caste, your country, sect, your name or your tribe
There’s people always dying trying to keep them alive
There’s bodies decomposing in containers tonight
In an abandoned building where
Squatters made a mural of a Mexican girl
With fifteen cans of spray paint and a chemical swirl
She’s standing in the ashes at the end of the world
Four winds blowing through her hair
But when great Satan’s gone… the Whore of Babylon…
She just can’t sustain the pressure where it’s placed
She caves
The Bible’s blind, the Torah’s deaf, the Qur’an’s mute
If you burned them all together you’d get close to the truth still
They’re pouring over Sanskrit on the Ivy League moons
While shadows lengthen in the sun
Cast all the school and meditation built to soften the times
And hold us at the center while the spiral unwinds
It’s knocking over fences crossing property lines
Four Winds, cry until it comes
And it’s the Sum of Man slouching towards Bethlehem
A heart just can’t contain all of that empty space
It breaks. It breaks. It breaks.
Well I went back by rented Cadillac and company jet
Like a newly orphaned refugee retracing my steps
All the way to Cassadaga to commune with the dead
They said, “You’d better look alive”
And I was off to old Dakota where a genocide sleeps
In the Black Hills, the Badlands, the calloused East
I buried my ballast. I made my peace.
Heard Four Winds, leveling the pines
But when great Satan’s gone… the Whore of Babylon…
She just can’t remain with all that outer space
She breaks. She breaks. She caves. She caves.
Elyn Saks’s The Center Cannot Hold: My Journey Through Madness (2007)
Must Love Dogs (2005)
Christopher Plummer reads “Brown Penny”
Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005)
The title is from Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”
The Hold Steady – ‘Chicago Seemed Tired Last Night’ (2005)
http://youtu.be/yhLdjYdQ7jk
The Hold Steady references Yeats himself twice in the song. Lyrics and some explanatory notes can be read here.
Bill Clinton’s My Life: The Presidential Years (2005)
From the book:
Bono was a big supporter of the peace process, and for my efforts he gave me a gift he knew I’d appreciate: a book of William Butler Yeats’s plays inscribed by the author and by Bono, who wrote, irreverently, “Bill, Hillary, Chelsea–This guy wrote a few good lyrics–Bono and Ali.” The Irish aren’t known for understatement, but Bono pulled it off. (p. 293)
Steven Spielberg’s Artificial Intelligence: AI (2001)
Robin Williams, as the voice of a computer named “Mr. Know,” whispers a few lines of Yeats’s “The Stolen Child” to Haley Joel Osment: “Come away, O human child! / To the waters and the wild / With a faery, hand in hand, / For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.”
Bono talks to Erik Philbrook of Playback Magazine (2001)
I remember as a child, growing up in Ireland. We were taught the poetry of William Butler Yeats. I must have been ten years old. The teacher said, “and then Yeats went through his dry period. He had a writing block and he couldn’t write about anything.” I remember putting up my hand, and saying “Well, why didn’t he write about that?” And the teacher just looked at me and said, “Oh, be quiet.” But that is exactly the answer to the writing block. You write about your own emptiness, and we’ve done that for years now.
Joni Mitchell’s “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” (1991)
Another reference to “The Second Coming” is Joni Mitchell’s song “Slouching Towards Bethlehem” off her 1991 album Night Ride Home.
Anthony Hopkins reads “He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven” to himself in the film 84 Charing Cross Road (1987)
Oliver Stone’s Wall Street (1987)
I couldn’t find a clip of the actual line, but apparently somewhere in this film Michael Douglas (as Wall Street big shot Gordon Gekko) says, “So the falcon’s heard the falconer, huh?”
Here’s the trailer:
The Smiths’ “Cemetry Gates” (1986)
Yeats (and Keats!) earns a shoutout from Morrissey in the song, but he chooses Oscar Wilde…
A dreaded sunny day
So I meet you at the cemetry gates
Keats and Yeats are on your side
A dreaded sunny day
So I meet you at the cemetry gates
Keats and Yeats are on your side
While Wilde is on mine
So we go inside and we gravely read the stones
All those people, all those lives
Where are they now?
With loves, and hates
And passions just like mine
They were born
And then they lived
And then they died
It seems so unfair
I want to cry
You say : “‘Ere thrice the sun done salutation to the dawn”
And you claim these words as your own
But I’ve read well, and I’ve heard them said
A hundred times (maybe less, maybe more)
If you must write prose/poems
The words you use should be your own
Don’t plagiarise or take “on loan”
‘Cause there’s always someone, somewhere
With a big nose, who knows
And who trips you up and laughs
When you fall
Who’ll trip you up and laugh
When you fall
You say : “‘Ere long done do does did”
Words which could only be your own
And then produce the text
From whence was ripped
(Some dizzy whore, 1804)
A dreaded sunny day
So let’s go where we’re happy
And I meet you at the cemetry gates
Oh, Keats and Yeats are on your side
A dreaded sunny day
So let’s go where we’re wanted
And I meet you at the cemetry gates
Keats and Yeats are on your side
But you lose
‘Cause weird lover Wilde is on mine
Sure!
Van Morrison’s “Crazy Jane On God” (1984)
The Defenders #97 – “Slouching Toward Bethlehem” released by Marvel (July 1, 1981)
Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem (1968)
Slouching Towards Bethlehem is a collection of essays and mainly describes Didion’s experiences in California during the 1960s.
Didion prefaces the collection by calling attention to the relevance of “The Second Coming”:
… for several years now certain lines from the Yeats poem which appears two pages back have reverberated in my inner ear as if they were surgically implanted there. The widening gyre, the falcon which does not hear the falconer, the gaze blank and pitiless as the sun; those have been my points of reference, the only images against which much of what I was seeing and hearing and thinking seemed to make any pattern.
A Terrible Beauty, film—retitled The Night Fighters for its U.S. release (1960)
A Terrible Beauty is based on Arthur Roth’s 1958 novel of the same name.
Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958)
When asked about his relationship to Yeats in an interview with The Paris Review, Achebe responds:
I wouldn’t make too much of that. I was showing off more than anything else. As I told you, I took a general degree, with English as part of it, and you had to show some evidence of that. But I liked Yeats! That wild Irishman. I really loved his love of language, his flow. His chaotic ideas seemed to me just the right thing for a poet. Passion! He was always on the right side. He may be wrongheaded, but his heart was always on the right side. He wrote beautiful poetry. It had the same kind of magic about it that I mentioned the wizard had for me. I used to make up lines with anything that came into my head, anything that sounded interesting. So Yeats was that kind of person for me. It was only later I discovered his theory of circles or cycles of civilization. I wasn’t thinking of that at all when it came time to find a title. That phrase “things fall apart” seemed to me just right and appropriate.
Though Achebe admits he didn’t have a complete grasp on Yeats while writing Things Fall Apart the two, both being a colonized people, have similar views on language in regards to colonization. In a speech entitled, “The African Writer and the English Language” (1975) Achebe said:
Is it right that a man should abandon his mother tongue for someone else’s? It looks like a dreadful betrayal and produces a guilty feeling. But for me there is no other choice. I have been given the language and I intend to use it. (Thiong’o, p. 263)
Yeats too had been given the language and, like most in Ireland, did not speak Irish and thus had to write in English:
We had no Gaelic, but paid great honour to the Irish poets who wrote in English, and quoted them in our speeches. I could have told you at that time the dates of the birth and death, and quoted the chief poems, of men whose names you have not heard, and perhaps of some whose names I have forgotten. I knew in my heart that the most of them wrote badly, and yet such romance clung about them, such a desire for Irish poetry was in all our minds, that I kept on saying, not only to others but to myself, that most of them wrote well, or all but well. (“Ideas of Good and Evil”)
Ray Bradbury’s The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)
Bradbury takes the title of his anthology of 22 short stories from a line in Yeats’s poem, “The Song of Wandering Aengus.” The last three lines of the poem are also included in the beginning of the book.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
I’d like to comment on a section of the documentary we watched today, particularly the part where Brendan Hughes discussed the IRA’s decision to kill Jean McConville, the mother of ten who they believed was passing information to the British Army. I found it troubling that Hughes was so adamant that she should’ve been executed, and that the main source of contention within the IRA was about where to hide her body, not about whether or not they ought to kill a mother of ten.
I think the IRA’s absolute certainty about executing McConville is a testament to the fact that sectarianism and adherence to absolute principles can promote dehumanization: they saw her as a traitor, and not a person just doing what she could to get by. Hughes’ testimony that he sees the decision as wrong now is a sign, to me, that he’s attempted to rationalize the things he’s done, but I still find it disturbing that he elaborated more on the conflict about disposing of her body than on the conflict that should arise in the decision to kill a mother of ten.
I admire Heaney’s honesty about his struggle with his principles in light of his identity in the scheme of the conflict. He is not absolute. I find comfort in the end of Exposure: he comes across to me as painfully human, being reminded of “The diamond absolutes”, yet knowing he is neither “internee nor informer”, and finding his place in exile, listening and interpreting the conflict around him – “feeling/ Every wind that blows”. I wonder if Heaney, in Hughes’ shoes, would have spoken out against the decision to execute McConville. In light of poems like Punishment, it’s possible that he would have resigned himself to silence, despite any empathy he might have felt for her. As I see him gaining a voice throughout North, and finding ways in which to discuss violence, I begin to think that Heaney did speak out against violence, particularly in poems like The Grauballe Man, where he emphasized the tragedy of death, “the actual weight/ of each hooded victim/ slashed and dumped”.
In order to play this presentation you need to download Google Earth on to your computer. If you simply Google, Google Earth, it will be the first thing that comes up and it is a free download. Once you have downloaded it, simply click on the above link and it will take you directly to the kmz file containing the presentation. Simply download that onto your computer and it should automatically open in Google Earth or if not, simply open it with Google Earth.. The presentation WILL NOT play correctly until you click on Google Earth on the top left side of your screen and hit preferences for a mac, or if you have a PC go to tools and then options. Once in options or preferences, click on touring and check the bubble labeled “Show balloon when waiting at features” and change the time between features setting to 3 seconds and the wait at features time to 15 seconds. Once these are hanged click on apply and then OK. Once that is complete, highlight the downloaded presentation with you mouse and click play (the small folder button with the play button next to it. This is located at the center left of your screen directly above the “Earth Gallery” Enjoy!
