‘The Given Note’: Traditional Music, Crisis and the Poetry of Seamus Heaney

Abstract

These remarks from Walter Benjamin provide a useful starting point from which to examine the presence of traditional music in the poetry of Irish poet Seamus Heaney. Much as Benjamin noted the changed relationship between the traditional storyteller and his audience, and that between the novelist and his reader, I want to suggest a parallel differentiation between the creation and communication of traditional music and its emergence and role in the work of Heaney. Furthermore, this chapter proposes that at a time when Northern Ireland increasingly descended into civil strife and crisis, Heaney looked to landscape and, to a lesser but comparable extent, traditional music, to articulate a distinctive voice, beyond the claims of tradition and community, ‘to use the first person singular’ as he has remarked, ‘to mean me and my lifetime’ (Randall, 1979, p. 20). Indeed, Heaney has faced a crisis of identity that has preoccupied Irish poets since at least the time of Yeats, a crisis brought on by the discontinuity in the Irish literary tradition, by an unresolved postcolonial condition and a struggle between the pull of community and tradition and that of the individual artist. Heaney’s poetry has been challenged by the tensions that underlie relations between each of these elements. Within his work, one finds a quest for motifs, including that provided by traditional music, adequate to his own predicament.

The Storyteller takes what he tells from experience — his own or that reported by others. And he in turn makes it the experience of those who are listening to his tale. The novelist has isolated himself. The birthplace of the novel is the solitary individual, who is no longer able to express himself by giving examples of his most important concerns, is himself uncounseled, and cannot counsel others.

(Benjamin, 1968, p. 87)