THE SHORT OXFORD HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE

stalwart above hacked marl. The clashing primary
colours — ‘Ethandune’, ‘Catraeth’, ‘Maldon’,
‘Pengwern’. Steel against yew and privet. Fresh
dynasties of smiths.
The smiths are both Offa’s craftsmen and the modern inheritors of the commonest of British surnames. In his later
volumes, Tenebrae (1978) and The Mystery of the Charity of Charles Péguy (1983), Hill moves beyond the matter of
Britain towards a wider exploration of the problems of pain and death. In the
[p. 608]
‘Lachrimae’ poems included in Tenebrae he returns to the densely worked sonnet forms of his earlier work (though
with reference to Renaissance spirituality and music), but in his extended tribute to the nationalist-Catholicism of
Péguy, Hill investigates a new landscape, that of the war-torn fields of an uneasy France.
In a lecture given in 1976, and reprinted in his collection of essays Preoccupations (1980), the Irish poet Seamus
Heaney (b. 1939) traced a ‘defensive love of their territory’ through the work of Larkin, Hughes, and Hill, a love
‘which was once shared only by those poets whom we might call colonial’. Heaney counts himself amongst the
colonials, but, as other essays in the volume suggest, he is fully aware of the doubleness and division of his
inheritance. ‘I speak and write in English’, he noted in an article written in 1972, ‘but do not altogether share the
preoccupations and perspectives of an Englishman ... the English tradition is not ultimately home. I live off another
hump as well.’ That other ‘hump’ is the Ireland, or more particularly the rural Ulster, which figures so delicately,
richly, and painfully in his verse. His Irish inheritance is multiple. Heaney’s Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door
into the Dark (1969) wonderingly recall and reconstruct a familiar childhood landscape peopled by farmers, labourers,
and fishermen. In Wintering Out (1972) and its two successors, North (1975) and Field Work (1979), Heaney broods
less on a private landscape and more on an island full of ‘comfortless noises’. His ‘hump’ is a place in which
successive strata of history continue to determine the perceptions of the present. In ‘Tinder’, flints, ‘cold beads of
history and home’, serve to spark a recall of a prehistoric past. In ‘Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication’ — the
memorial lyrics which preface Heaney’s most obviously ‘political’ volume, North — he extends his perspective from
his father’s farm to include the ‘troubles’ of Ulster and their relationship to the long and contentious history of
Ireland. Part I of the volume opens with ‘Antaeus’ (a reference to the giant whose strength came from touching his
mother, the earth). It is followed by ‘Belderg’, a poem in which history emerges from the soil as ‘quernstones out of a
bog’ and is implicit in the very name of the Heaney farm, ‘Mossbawn’ (‘He crossed my old home’s music | With older
strains of Norse ... I could derive | A forked root from that ground | And make bawn an English fort, | A planter’s
walled-in mound | Or else find sanctuary | And think of it as Irish’). These four strains, the prehistoric, the Gaelic, the
Norse, and the English, continue to haunt the volume. Although many of the poems deal directly with the present,
with ‘neighbourly murder’, with Orange drums ‘like giant tumours’, and with blasted streets where ‘the gelignite’s a
common sound efiect’, Heaney also sees the rifts in Irish life as rooted in a long history of occupation and imperial
influence. ‘Freedman’ acknowledges parallels to ancient Roman slavery in subjugation to the culture of the Roman
Church (‘I was under that thumb too like all my caste’), but ‘Viking Dublin: Trial Pieces’, ‘Bone Dreams’, and
‘Punishment’ variously recognize the prefigurations of modern anxieties which are contained in Ireland’s
archaeological and
[p. 609]
linguistic subsoil. ‘Bone Dreams’ and the volume’s title poem see ‘dictions’ and ‘past philology and kennings’ as an
inheritance which obliges an Irish poet to come to terms with the Teutonic roots of the imperial language, English. In
‘North’, a glance back to Viking Ireland, and to Norse enterprise and Norse ruthlessness, leads into a reflection on
how a poet can use a language buried, like an alien treasure, in his native soil. A voice, associated with ‘violence and
epiphany’, but, like some Viking longship, ‘buoyant with hindsight’, offers the advice:
‘Lie down
in the word-hoard, burrow
in the coil and gleam
of your furrowed brain.
Compose in darkness.
Expect aurora borealis
in the long foray