Vol.

33 (2010): 271-287

Seamus Heaney's Sonnets: Glanmore Sonnets,

Clearances and Glanmore Revisited
Hong, Sung Sook(Cheongju Univ.)

I
Sonnet is a 14-lined poem in the lyric mood whose subject is mainly about
love. Seamus Heaney experimented the genre of sonnet in his three books.
Glanmore Sonnets in Field Work, Clearances, a series of sonnets in The Haw
Lantern, and Glanmore Revisited in Seeing Things are the examples. Interestingly,
it was since he moved to Southern Ireland that he started writing poems in the
genre of sonnet.1) It was the time that the poet wished only peace. Field Work in
1979 contains his desire for peace and peaceful rural life after exile; The Haw
1) Sonnet, meaning little songs is a genre that can be found in lyric poetry. By the thirteenth
century, it had come to signify a poem of fourteen lines that follows a strict rhyme scheme and
specific structure. The conventions associated with the sonnet have evolved over its history. Its
flexibility in form and content was extended even further in the 20th century. Among the major
poets of the early modernist period, Robert Frost and E.E.Cummings all used the sonnet regularly.
William Butler Yeats wrote the major sonnet, Leda and the Swan. Wilfred Owens sonnet
Anthem for Doomed Youth was another sonnet of the early 20th century. W. H. Auden wrote two
sonnet sequences and several other sonnets throughout his career. However, among other things,
Seamus Heaneys Glanmore Sonnets and Clearances are estimated as the best sonnets in the
20th century.

272

Hong, Sung Sook

Lantern in 1984 was motivated by longing for his dead mother; Seeing Things in
1991 for his dead father. The three books have two things in common: the poet has
changed his style and subjects and that they no longer contain the Northern
Troubles.
This paper aims to investigate why Seamus Heaney adopted the genre of sonnet
after he moved to Southern Ireland and what he tried to depict by the genre of
sonnet. Although such critics like Andrews Elmer, Thomas C. Foster, Sidney Burris
and Michael Parker2) have already dealt with Heaneys works including sonnets in a
general way, this paper selects, and focuses on, only sonnets from Seamus Heaneys
works.

II
Glanmore, Heaneys shelter, just after he moved to Republic of Ireland, can be
compared to W. Wordsworths Grasmere. The place seems to offer Heaney and his
family a shelter surrounded by peaceful landscape, which Heaney seems to think a
very ideal place. However, we can additionally find everywhere of Field Work, his
homesickness and also on-going preoccupation with Ulster Troubles.3) While the
persona of the first sonnet in Field Work has been curing his wound from Ulster
Troubles by the ground's freshness, he still feels some anxiety and obstacle, which
can be proved by his remarks on ghosts and freakish Easter snows. And the first
line, Now the good life could be to cross a field(FW 33) indicates that now he
feels comfortable and is inspired by the field, breathing things Irish from this place.
2) Elmer Andrews The Poetry of Seamus Heaney, Thomas C. Fosters Seamus Heaney, Sidney
Burriss Seamus Heaney and the Pastoral Tradition and Michael Parkers The Making of the Poet
deal with Seamus Heaneys later works including Field Work, The Haw Lantern and Seeing
Things in a broad-brush way.
3) Such my hypothesis can be enforced by the following remarks: One of the dominant emotions in
Field Work was wistful homesickness for Ulster. In the next two books, the homesick poet is
identified with Mad Sweeney, the banished Ulster poet of medieval Irish legend. (O'Donoghue 88)

Seamus Heaneys Sonnets: Glanmore Sonnets, Clearances and Glanmore Revisited 273

This sonnets persona tries to compare farming with writing, feeling himself prepared
to make a new-style poem.
Now the good life could be to cross a field
And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe
Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled.
Old ploughsocks gorge the subsoil of each sense
And I am quickened with a redolence
Of the fundamental dark unblown rose.
Wait then . . . Breasting the mist, in sowers aprons,
My ghosts come striding into their spring stations.
The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows. (FW, 33)

The second sonnet depicts the features of Glanmore sonnets: his poem, returning
like the plough, turns round. In the third sonnet, the poet identifies his wife and
himself with Wordsworth and Dorothy dipped in the lyrical atmosphere. And he
mentions the landscape can inspire the rhythm of poems like iambic and cadences
This evening the cuckoo and the corncrake
(So much, too much) consorted at twilight.
It was all crepuscular and iambic.
....
I had said earlier, I wont relapse
From this strange loneliness Ive brought us to.
Dorothy and William- She interrupts:
Youre not going to compare us two . . . ?
Outside a rustling and twig-combing breeze
Refreshes and relents. Is cadences. (FW, 35)

In the 4th sonnet, when the train approaches him, the persona feels that the
vibration has been transmitted over the woods of trails. This makes the persona
perceive that the world of nature is closely related to the world of man.

274

Hong, Sung Sook

I used to lie with an ear to the line
For that way, they said, there should come a sound
Escaping ahead, an iron tune
....
But I never heard that. Always, instead,
Struck couplings and shuntings two miles away
Lifted over the woods. The head
Of a horse swirled back from a gate
....
Two fields back, in the house, small ripples shook
Silently across our drinking water
(As they are shaking now across my heart)
And vanished into where they seemed to start. (FW 36)

In the 5th sonnet, the persona recalls the game of touching tongues in
boortree that was his playground in his childhood. The game of touching tongues
let the child understand the source and the derivation of the words and build a
career as a poet. Although the persona still wants to stay there, hearing the sound
of waves as he used to do, the word, would, indicates that it is only a hope.
Boortree is bower tree, where I played touching tongues
And felt anothers texture quick on mine.
So, etymologist of roots and graftings,
I fall back to my tree-house and would crouch
Where small buds shoot and flourish in the hush. (FW 37)

The ninth sonnet describes his wife threatened by rats on the kitchen sill and
the poet who was led by his wife's screaming. However, it is the very wifes face
like a new moon that the poet found outside the kitchen. This poem intends to
show the strong partnership between the poet and his wife. The romantic and lyrical
atmosphere is coloured by the moonlight.

Seamus Heaneys Sonnets: Glanmore Sonnets, Clearances and Glanmore Revisited 275
Outside the kitchen window a black cat
Sways on the briar like infected fruit:
It looked me through, it stared me out, Im not
Imagining things. Go you out to it.
....
The empty briar is swishing
When I come down, and beyond, your face
Haunts like a new moon glimpsed through tangled glass. (FW 41)

The tenth sonnet compares the coldness of the present with the fever-like
passion some years ago. From the tenth line, the poet recalls the partner's deliberate
kiss which he thinks both lovely and painful covenants of flesh. After the first
night, the poet feels their separateness. And he refers it to the respite in their dewy
dreaming faces.
I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal
On turf banks under blankets, with our faces
Exposed all night in a wetting drizzle,
Pallid as the dripping sapling birches.
....
Our first night years ago in that hotel
When you came with your deliberate kiss
To raise us towards the lovely and painful
Covenants of flesh; our separateness;
The respite in our dewy dreaming faces. (FW 42)

III
Clearances contains eight sonnets, each written in an elegiac mode, which
means that Heaney wants to commemorating his dead mother. And these eight
sonnets show how much affection and respect the poet feels for his mother. In
other words, these sonnets show the poets deep filial piety to his mother, one of

276

Hong, Sung Sook

features of Celtic traditional cultures. And also, we can infer that his mothers death
leads him to the sense of emptiness and the meditation of death. The first sonnet
deals with the sectarianism between the catholic and the protestant. A small pebble
thrown to the great grandma means some punishment for the people who betrayed
their religion. The first octave depicts the punishment of the turncoat; the sestet is a
poet's declaration that the ancestor is free of sectarianism.
A cobble thrown a hundred years ago
Keeps coming at me, the first stone
Aimed at a great-grandmothers turncoat brow.
The pony jerks and the riots on.
....
Call her The Convert. The Exogamous Bride.
Anyhow, it is a genre piece
Inherited on my mothers side
And mine to dispose with now shes gone.
Instead of silver and Victorian lace,
The exonerating, exonerated stone. (HL 25)

Thcond one is the collection of images reminding the poet of his Mom: the
shiny table, mothers story-telling, and the poet's grandpa who has special affection
for the personas mom.
It is Number 5, New Row, Land of the Dead,
Where grandfather is rising from his place
With spectacles pushed back on a clean bald head.
To welcome a bewildered homing daughter
Before she even knocks. Whats this? Whats this?
And they sit down in the shining room together. (HL, 26)

The third one is about the relationship between mother and son. The former
stanza depicts some sense of love between son and mom while the poet and mom

Seamus Heaneys Sonnets: Glanmore Sonnets, Clearances and Glanmore Revisited 277

were peeling off the potatoes. The cyclical atmosphere from silence through
breaking it and to returning to it stirred up some native atmosphere of the Celtic
home. And the labor of potatos peeling associates us with some things Irish. And
the latter part describes the death-bed of his mom and also expresses the personas
regret that he has not devoted all his life to his mom although he felt the last
breath of his dying moms who leaned her head against him. This sonnet offers us
some comfort by showing the warm relationship between mom and son.
When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other's work would bring us to our senses.
So while the parish priest at her beside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head,
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knivesNever closer the whole rest of our lives (HL 27)

The fourth depicts sons regards and respect for the ignorant mother by using
only the Gaelic dialect when the poet talks with his mom. And the fifth vividly
depicts how the persona helps his mother with labour of folding the bed-sheets.
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem.
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind,
They made a dried-out undulating thwack. (HL 29)

278

Hong, Sung Sook

The 6th describes a pleasant memory of son and mom at Easter Holiday night.
This sonnet has the form of Italian sonnet which comprises 1 octave and 1 sestet
depicting the sacrament.
In the first flush of the Easter holidays
The ceremonies during Holy Week
Were highpoints of our Sons and Lovers phase
The midnight fire. The paschal candlestick.
Elbow to elbow, glad to be kneeling next
To each other up there near the front
Of the packed church, we would follow the text
And rubrics for the blessing of the font.
As the hind longs for the streams, so my soul
Dippings. Towellings. The water breathed on.
The water mixed with chrism and with oil.
Cruet tinkle. Formal incensation
And the psalmist's outcry taken up with pride:
Day and night my tears have been my bread. (The H.L.,30)

The 7th is about Moms death-bed where Mom could hear Dad talk for the
longest time throughout his life; his head was tilting toward Mom who couldnt hear
his voice when Dad called mom a good girl. The poet staring at the scene to his
satisfaction, Moms pulse just stopped. The octave mostly describes his Moms death
bed; the sestet is about the personas feeling of emptiness after his Moms death.
This sonnet rhymed aabcbbbeefggee does not use the traditional rhyme scheme.
In the last minutes he said more to her
Almost than in all their life together.
....
His head was bent down to her propped-up head.
She could not hear but we were overjoyed.
He called her good and girl. Then she was dead,
The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned

Seamus Heaneys Sonnets: Glanmore Sonnets, Clearances and Glanmore Revisited 279
And we all knew one thing by being there.
The space we stood around had been emptied
Into us to keep, it penetrated
Clearances that suddenly stood open.
High cries were felled and pure change happened. (HL, 31)

The 8th describes how deep emptiness he feels after his mother's death,
identifying himself with the chestnut tree.4)
I thought of walking round and round a space
Utterly empty, utterly a source
Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place
In our front hedge above the wallflowers.
The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high.
I heard the hatchet's differentiated
Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh
And collapse of what luxuriated
Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all.
Deep planted and long gone, my coeval
Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole,
Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere,
A soul ramifying and forever
Silent, beyond silence listened for. (HL, 32)

IV
Seeing Things contain seven sonnets which picture memory of Glanmore where
he lived just after he moved to Southern Ireland. The first sonnet entitled

4) In the critical book entitled Icon Critical Guides, Seamus Heaney edited by Elmer Andrews, tree,
nature, native Ireland and femininity are all equated: Tree=Nature=native Ireland=femininity. The
familiar equation is familiarly extended when the tree in In the Chestnut Tree, gorgeously female,
is earthed and breathes like poetry.(Andrews p.169)

280

Hong, Sung Sook

Scrabble commemorates his friend, Tom Delaney, an archaeologist. In the first

sonnet, the poet associates Tom with the word, scrabble. Although this poem
consists of two parts, octave and sestet as the traditional sonnet does, the rhyme
scheme is not fit for the traditional one. The octave is full of the past memory.
The second part of sestet depicts their relationship. The persona tries to express
such meanings as let it be, intransitive, scratch or rake at something hard.
. . . .
So scrabble let it be. Intransitive.
Meaning to scratch or rake at something hard.
Which is what he hears. Our scraping, clinking tools. (ST 31)

The second sonnet depicts his child's bed on which the poet and his daughter
fell asleep together. The first stanza also depicts the place his children used to play
with the farm tools. In the second stanza, his daughter's cot is said to be more
lovely than keepsakes, which reminds the poet of the past days he fell asleep with
his young daughter, taking care of her.
Which must be more than keepsakes, even though
The childs cots back in place where Catherine
Woke in the dawn and answered doodle doo
To the rooster in the farm across the roadAnd is the same cot I myself slept in
When the whole world was a farm that eked and crowed. (ST 32)

The third sonnet describes the wounded tree has been healed up whose bark his
kids stripped off and that the poet got angry with his kids. However, when he saw
the peeled tree come to life, the poet dropped tears with astonishment like a veteran
of the war.
Only days after a friend had cut his name

Seamus Heaneys Sonnets: Glanmore Sonnets, Clearances and Glanmore Revisited 281
Into the ash, our kids stripped off the barkThe first time I was really angry at them.
I was flailing round the house like a man berserk
And maybe overdoing it, although
The business had moved me at the time;
It brought back those blood-brother scenes where two
Braves nick wrists and cross them for a sign.
Where it shone like bone exposed is healed up now.
The bark's thick-eared and welted with a scarLike the heros in a recognition scene
In which old nurse sees old wound, then clasps brow
(Astonished at what all this starts to mean)
And tears surprise the veteran of the war. (ST 33)

The fourth sonnet, 1973, describes the poet's hard-working activity of writing
poems, like an ailing farmer. The first stanza pictures a lonely poet in a reek of
cigarette smoke. The second stanza is about difficulty of writing poems: although
Lent comes like a lion, the poet preoccupied with writing is forgetting even his will
to consecrate his nicotine-scented body.
The corrugated iron growled like thunder
When March came in; then as the year turned warmer
And invalids and bulbs came up from under,
I hibernated on behind the dormer,
Staring through shaken branches at the hill,
Dissociated, like an ailing farmer
Chloroformed against things seasonal
In a reek of cigarette smoke and dropped ash.
Lent came in next, also like a lion
Sinewy and wild for discipline,
A fasted will marauding through the body;
And I taunted it with scents of nicotine
As I lit one off another, and felt rash,

282

Hong, Sung Sook

And stirred in the deep litter of the study. (ST 34)

The fifth sonnet depicts the poets revisiting home where he once preoccupied
himself with purifying words. Actually, the house doesnt fit the poets taste because
it seems to be too self-protective a house with narrow stairs and the old bed-frame
in spite of blinds and curtains drawn over.
Breaking and entering: from early on,
Words that thrilled me far more than they scared meAnd still did, when I came into my own
Masquerade as a man of property.
Even then, my first impulse was never
To double-bar a door or lock a gate;
And fitted blinds and curtains drawn over
Seemed far too self-protective and uptight. (ST 35)

The sixth sonnet reminds one of the latter part of Miltons Il Penseroso since
the poet keeps awake, reading Homers works through the night. The first stanza of
octave rhymed abbacbba depicts the atmosphere of his bed room with fresh air and
green ivy creeping in where the poet swims in white-mouthed depression; and the
next stanza of sestet rhymed def depicts the poet who swims in Homer.
The whole place airier. Big summer trees
Stirring at eye level when we waken
And little shoots of ivy creeping in
Unless theyve been trained out-like memories
Youve trained so long now they can show their face
And keep their distance. White-mouthed depression
Swims out from its shadow like a dolphin
With wet, unreadable, unfurtive eyes.
I swim in Homer. In Book Twenty-three.
At last Odysseus And Penelope

Seamus Heaneys Sonnets: Glanmore Sonnets, Clearances and Glanmore Revisited 283
Waken together. One bedpost of the bed
Is the living trunk of an old olive tree
And is their secret. As ours could have been ivy,
Evergreen, atremble and unsaid. (ST 36)

The last as the 7th sonnet, The Skylight describes the roof window which
gives the poet a tremendous and amazing effect of entering sky although he, at
first, opposed making the window facing into the sky because he likes
nest-up-in-the-roof. The poet identifies himself with a sick man who suffered from
palsy, but finally healed and walked away.
You were the one for skylights. I opposed
Cutting into the seasoned tongue-and-groove
Of pitch pine. I liked it low and closed,
Its claustrophobic, nest-up-in-the-roof
Effect. I liked the snuff-dry feeling,
The perfect, trunk-lid fit of the old ceiling.
Under there, it was all hutch and hatch.
The blue slates kept the heat like midnight thatch.
But when the slates came off, extravagant
Sky entered and held surprise wide open.
For days I felt like an inhabitant
Of that house where the man sick of the palsy
Was lowered through the roof, had his sins forgiven,
Was healed, took up his bed and walked away. (ST 37)

V
Through reading sonnets selected from Field Work, The Haw Lantern and
Seeing Things, I came to the following conclusion: The sonnets of Field Work
express the poets dual mind of relief and sin which ensued from his escape from

284

Hong, Sung Sook

the massacre, discarding his relatives and his community. Sonnets in The Haw
Lantern, on the whole, show his filial piety and affection for his dead mom by
trying to remember the moment of being together. Seven sonnets in Seeing Things
are the recollection of Glanmore where he settled down with his family and wanted
to live in peace, escaping from Ulster turmoil.
Analyzing the content of each book, it is found that the sonnets of Field Work
deal with love for landscape and family, including the beloved relationship between
husband and wife and the poet's childhood. And the sonnets of The Haw Lantern
deal with love for mom; the sonnets of Seeing Things deal with love for writing in
the mood of recollection.
Meanwhile, these sequences of sonnets have some similarities and differences.
They have something in common: the poet writes poems in a lyrical mood of such
a peaceful atmosphere so we cannot no longer find some agony and repentance;
these sonnets deal with the individual things rather than the communal ones. By
contrast, these sonnets show the different tone: humorous or childlike tone in Field
Work, elegiac one in The Haw Lantern and the recollective tone of Seeing Things.

Works Cited
Burris, Sidney. The Poetry of Resistance. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1990.
Elmer, Andrews. The Poetry of Seamus Heaney. Cambridge: Icon Books Ltd, 1998.
Foster C, Thomas. Seamus Heaney. Dublin: The O'Brien Press, 1989.
Fuller, John. The Sonnet. London: Methuen, 1972.
Heaney, Seamus. Field Work. London: Faber and Faber, 1979. (abbreviated as FW)
_____. ed. Alan Peacock. For Liberation: Brian Friel and the Use of Memory, in
The Achievement of Brian Friel. Gerrards Cross: Colin Smythe. 1993, p.240.

Seamus Heaneys Sonnets: Glanmore Sonnets, Clearances and Glanmore Revisited 285

_____. Seeing Things. London: Faber and Faber, 1991. (abbreviated as ST)
_____. The Haw Lantern. London: Faber and Faber, 1987. (abbreviated as THL)
_____. The Redress of Poetry. London: Faber and Faber, 1995.
Hong, Sung Sook. Digging memory of the dead in Field Work, The Haw Lantern
and Seeing Things Yeats Journal of Korea 30 (June 2009): 251-268.
______. Modernism and post-modernism aesthetics in Seeing Things Yeats Journal
of Korea 29 (June 2008): 209-224.
______. Comparison of W.B.Yeats Lyric poems with Seamus Heaney's ones:
focusing on local landscape poems Yeats Journal of Korea 8 (May 1998):
89-108.
O'Donoghue Bernard. Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry. Hemel
Hempstead: Biddles Ltd, 1994.
Parker, Michael. Seamus Heaney: The Making of the Poet. Iowa City: Univ. of
Iowa Press, 1993.
Ramazani, Jahan. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney.
University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Sacks, Peter. The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats. Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1987.

286

Hong, Sung Sook

Seamus Heaney's Sonnets: Glanmore Sonnets,

Clearances and Glanmore Revisited
Abstract

Hong, Sung Sook

Sonnet is a 14-lined poem in the lyric mood whose subject is mainly about
love. Heaney experimented the genre of sonnet in his three books: Glanmore
Sonnets in Field Work Clearances in The Haw Lantern and Glanmore Revisited
in Seeing Things. These three books have two things in common: the poet have
changed his style and subject and that they no longer contain the Northern Troubles.
Through reading sonnets selected from Field Work, The Haw Lantern and
Seeing Things, I came to the following conclusion: the reason the poet adopted the
genre of sonnet is that he wanted to write about love, not hatred or violence after
he escaped from massacre of Ulster Trouble. And sonnets of three books depict
three different kinds of love: love for family, love for landscape and love for
writing.
The sonnets of Field Work are characterized by the poets contrary mind: the
sense of relief and the sense of sin because he ran out of the massacre, discarding
his relatives and his community. Sonnets in The Haw Lantern on the whole, show
his filial piety and affection for his dead mom by trying to remember the moment
of being together. Seven sonnets in Seeing Things are the recollection of Glanmore
where he settled down with his family and wanted to live in peace, escaping from
Ulster turmoil.
Meanwhile, these sequence of sonnets have some difference: these sonnets have
the different tone: humorous or childlike tone in Field Work, elegiac tone in The
Haw Lantern and the recollective tone of Seeing Things.

Seamus Heaneys Sonnets: Glanmore Sonnets, Clearances and Glanmore Revisited 287

(Key Words)

(Glanmore Sonnets), (Clearances),

(Glanmore Revisited), (love for family), (love for landscape),
(love for writing)
: 2010 4 30
: 2010 5 30

: 2010 5 29