Analysis of Seamus Heany's Poem Clearances

The critic's observation that Heany "salvages [the ancient] consolatory tropes by curtailing their promise" is particularly astute in the case of Heany's "Clearances." The sequence of sonnets accomplishes the same age-old work of mourning because of its "limited" nature, as opposed to the certainly less earthbound flights of fancy of the classic elegies of Milton and Arnold. Indeed, the structure of the poem, or rather, poems, perhaps best illustrates the difference between the nature of the consolation which it offers and that of its classic predecessors.

The nine-line poem Heany places as an epigram hints both at this key difference and at the poems' work of mourning. For the latter point, the second and third lines of the epigrammatic poem practically spell it out: "How easily the biggest coal block split / If you got the grain and hammer angled right." In the elegaic context, the coal block is easily seen to be standing in for the work of mourning itself: its "linear black" suggests the facelessness of great sorrow, an overwhelming sadness one could not get one's arms around. That coal is subterranean in nature, brought out from the depths of the earth, lends the image the sense that the coal is displaced by the return of the dead to the earth. In any case, that Heany is focusing on the possibility of splitting the coal block indicates his focus on getting the mourning done, rather than giving in to the coal-dark immensity of sorrow. His epigram poem ends on a note of invocation, of who exactly it is unclear: "Teach me now to listen, / To strike it rich behind the linear black." Having recalled that even the biggest coal block can be split, and concentrated on that truth, Heany offers up a sort of prayer that he will be able to do the splitting before beginning the task with the first of the sonnets.

As for the former of the two points, the difference between the way Heany's poems will accomplish the work of mourning and the way of the old elegies, it too lies in the epigram poem's subject of splitting a block. The block-splitting imagery is connected to the nature of "Clearances" itself, namely its' being a sonnet sequence rather than a through-composed poem a la Lycidas or Thyrsis. Those elegies aimed to wrap their arms around the whole block, to extend the analogy traced above; that is, they purported to do the entire work of mourning in one shot, the whole process happening all at once through the whole great long poem. For this end, Milton and Arnold needed to transport themselves to an entirely different world created with pastoral conventions and held up by grandiose allusions. For their times, such conventions were accepted, and one could accomplish all the work of mourning in one poem and come out alive at the end. Things have changed, of course, since then: the world we westerners once imagined we knew the entire Euro-centric whole of has turned out to be an enormous, fractured mess, and things become even more broken apart when someone dies.

Heany, though, has taken fracture and used it to recover "the ancient consolatory tropes" of elegy. In a word, (most) people these days do not understand pastoral monikers, slantwise comparisons to Orpheus, and long, long poems. They do not ring true for us like they did for Milton, Arnold, and their audiences. What does have a resonant ring these days are vignettes, episodes of plain, normal life in which that poignant something can be discerned which used to come out in a long, long poem. As the critic notes, "Lycidas, Adonais, and the saints in heaven" just do not move people the same way they used to. Our backgrounds are too variegated now; we do not all share the deep-seated underpinnings of classical western culture anymore - not everybody reads the Iliad. But the closeness of silently peeling potatoes with one's mother while no one else is around, we can relate to (even if we have never ourselves peeled potatoes). That "pure change," that one thing we all knew by being there, that emptying of the space we stood around - we can relate to that.

Heany hits and loosens, and splits the coal block to pieces we can handle. The critic calls this splitting "curtailing" and "limitation." It really means the opposite: Heany opens up again the possibility of consolation by taking the biggest coal block not all at once, but in pieces. Each sonnet is such a piece, taking the whole work of mourning a bit at a time, from "the first stone / Aimed at a great-grandmother's turncoat brow" and "the first flush of the Easter holidays" to "the last minutes" and the "Clearances that suddenly stood open."