History, Myth, and Apocalypse in Seamus Heaney's "North"

Abstract

gusto that typified his later years, I am still of the opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mind sex and the (Letters 730). For Yeats history had turned Ireland into a holy land comparable to Greece, where spirits of the dead inhabited every hill and rath. But the dead lived only for those capable of imagining them, and Yeats excoriated the democratic, commercial, commonsensical which failed to appreciate his phantasmal necropolis. Only through a violent sexual annunciation, he believed, like the one foisted by Zeus upon Leda, could the inert masses awaken to a proper recognition of the heroic dead. Sexuality and death posed against the mob and democracy, Seamus Deane has written (Celtic 143), was Yeats's plan for revolution as well as revelation. If apocalypse was to occur, Yeats's ideal aristocrat and peasant his custodians of culture-would first have to pitch the modern set into the fecund ditch where blindmen battered blindmen and madwomen copulated with beggars. Death, sex, and a gruesome fusion of the two find a new and startling expression in Seamus Heaney's North, a book which marks another stage in Heaney's long, fertile contest with Yeats. Heaney descends into history's mire, but with the purpose of offering up the dead to be judged for their deeds and the deeds done against them. He lingers with erotic fondness on victims of ritual killings, knowing all the while that their deaths were inspired, ironically, by myths of sexual fertility. His intentions are apocalyptic. Description is revelation! he exclaims at the beginning of Fosterage (71; apokalupsis in Greek means a revelation, an uncovering). With John of Patmos,

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