A CATHOLIC SENSIBILITY IN THE POETRY OF SEAMUS HEANEY

Abstract

In this thesis I set out to explore Catholicism as a felt sense in Seamus Heaney’s poetry from his first collection Death of a Naturalist (1966) to his last collection Human Chain (2010). Chapter One sets the scene of Heaney’s Catholic sensibility, which was rooted in his childhood home of Mossbawn and formalised in the learning of the Catholic Catechism at school and his early exposure to writers such as Gerard Manley Hopkins and Patrick Kavanagh. Chapter Two identifies a Catholic sensibility in Heaney’s use of sacramental language which consecrates the body as a unique good in Death of a Naturalist, manual labour in Door into the Dark, and place in Wintering Out. Chapter Three looks at Heaney’s treatment of death in terms of Catholic ritual, including the veneration of relics (North), and the tactile piety which informs some of the elegies in Field Work and The Haw Lantern. Heaney’s complex engagement with Catholicism in Station Island is the subject of Chapter Four, and I read the collection alongside his translation Sweeney Astray, published in the same year. Chapter Five explores Heaney’s attempts to go beyond the limits of the material world (Seeing Things), and identifies this longing in the nature of love, and its demands, in The Spirit Level (exemplified in the saints) and Electric Light. In Chapter Six I argue that Catholicism operates in a more embedded way in the poems of District and Circle and Human Chain but remains as part of a sensibility which expands to include writers such as the classical poet Virgil. I identify four ways in which Catholicism operates in Heaney’s poetry and draw attention to how these weave their way through the six chapters as: i) iconography, ii) sacramental vision, iii) poetic process, and iv) syntax and form.