Analysis: As I become increasingly aware of my diminishing attention span, I find myself drawn again to Heaney's poems of concentration
By James Costello O'Reilly, Queens University Belfast
In her poem 'August 30th 2013’, Leontia Flynn recalls the day of Seamus Heaney’s death. As the news broke across social media, she remembers, quotations from Heaney’s poems were tweeted and retweeted, posted and shared: ‘Twitter erupts, it seems, in shards of verse.’ In a few days’ time, we are bound to see a similar pattern. August 30th 2023 marks the tenth anniversary of the occasion of Flynn’s poem.
As the tributes pour in across Twitter (is anybody really calling it ‘X’?), it might be worth bearing in mind what ‘August 30th 2013’ has to say about reading Heaney in the digital age. Flynn contrasts the attentive, meticulous quality of Heaney’s work with the speeded-up culture of the twenty-first century: ‘we zigzag digitally, thrilled, frenetic’, she says at the end of one stanza, ‘but slowly forgetting how we might go slow.’
The continuing value of Heaney’s work, for Flynn, lies partly in its defence of slowness. As she puts it in a later essay called ‘Radically Necessary’, a Heaney poem insists upon ‘a space of interior contemplation’. It is not just the result of deliberate and patient concentration, but also rewards deliberate and patient reading. This is a far cry from our networks of ‘clicking, scrolling and speed-reading’, as Flynn puts it elsewhere, which measure ‘engagement’ in quantitative, rather than qualitative, terms.
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From RTÉ Lyric FM, a guided tour of Seamus Heaney via the RTÉ Archives
At this point, it is worth clarifying that ‘contemplation’ and concentration are hardly the preserve of Heaney’s work. After all, this is where a good deal of art, not to mention poetry, might be said to begin. (Quite recently, I tapped into my Notes app David Bromwich’s description of William Wordsworth’s poetry as ‘a confession of the effects of attention; a pure, pointless concentration.’) Yet many of Heaney’s best poems are those which pay attention to the attention of others.
Take ‘Sunlight’, for example, the very first poem in Heaney’s 1975 collection, North. Dedicated to Mary Heaney, the poet’s aunt, it watches through the eyes of a child as she bakes bread. Looking closely at its final three stanzas, we notice that they are structured around so-called deictic words—words that point, if you like, at specific places, things, and times. ‘Now’, ‘now’, the poem says, ‘here’, ‘here’. We tend to say these words to children, and often in this order; there is something reassuring, even mindful, about how they return us to the present moment. In ‘Sunlight’, this means refocusing our attention on Aunt Mary—on what she is doing, where she is going, with each new moment.
If this all sounds quite romantic, it is worth remembering that ‘Sunlight’ describes a scene of domestic work. That work is a kind of feminine counterpart to the patrilineal labour of ‘Digging’, which itself seems a poem of painstaking concentration (who could forget the father’s ‘straining rump among the flowerbeds’?). Yet there is something restless about its focus. We begin with the ‘squat pen’ and with the ‘squat pen’ we end. ‘Digging’ is always itching to return to the question of writing; the father’s labour is really a metaphor for excavations of a literary nature.
Read more: why are politicians so fond of quoting Seamus Heaney?
To me, ‘Sunlight’ seems altogether more delicate and tactful in its attention to its subject. Aunt Mary’s absorption in her work is mirrored by Heaney’s absorption in her. At the end of the poem, ‘here is a space again’ refers both to the rising scone and to what Flynn calls the ‘interior space’ of the poem; similarly, ‘here is love’ encompasses both the selflessness of domestic labour and the poem’s own loving attention. Heaney does not need to compare baking bread to writing, in other words, because the affinity is amply demonstrated by the poem itself.
In a discussion at the 2008 New Yorker festival, Heaney says that 'Sunlight' ‘really wants to be a Vermeer, if it could be.’ A painting like Vermeer’s The Milkmaid perfectly demonstrates the attentive quality of Heaney’s best work. For Vermeer, the absolute concentration of the milkmaid demands the absolute concentration of the artist—a meticulous attention to shadow and light, motion and stillness. The wonderful paradox of the painting is that we cannot have one without the other.
Little wonder, then, that ‘Sunlight’ opens on the Vermeer-like image of ‘a sunlit absence’. The quietness, even the loneliness, of the interior scene is what affords the artist ‘total immersion’, as the great American poet Elisabeth Bishop puts it. Heaney’s poem even ends on ‘immersion’ in a literal sense: ‘the tinsmith’s scoop / sunk past its gleam / in the meal-bin’ remains, to my mind, among his most revelatory images.
From RTÉ News, Seamus Heaney is laid to rest in Co Derry in a funeral mass attended by hundreds of mourners
It is doubtless with poems like ‘Sunlight’ in mind that Flynn praises Heaney’s ‘love poems, both romantic and familial, which strike me now as extraordinarily sensitive in their representation of domesticity and maternity’. It is to those poems, too, that I have increasingly returned in recent years. This may be to do with the imposed domesticity of the pandemic, and how it forced us to reimagine—sometimes bizarrely, if we’re being honest—our interior spaces.
Primarily, though, I suspect it is a consequence of what ‘August 30th 2013’ calls our ‘multi-platform din and drift’. As I become increasingly aware of my diminishing attention span, and as my mindfulness apps continue to urge awareness, attention, and presentness, I find myself drawn again to Heaney’s poems of concentration—poems worth concentrating on.
James Costello O'Reilly is a PhD candidate in the School of Arts, English and Languages at Queens University Belfast.
The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
