Seamus Heaney's 'The Strand at Lough Beg': An inter-textual reading

Seamus Heaney’s “The Strand at Lough Beg”: An Intertextual
Reading1
BY ELISABETTA PELLEGRINO
“The Strand at Lough Beg” first appeared in Seamus Heaney’s Field Work (1979) as one
of the six elegies included in the collection. The poem was written in memory of Heaney’s
second cousin Colum McCartney, a young Catholic who was shot by Protestant militants in the
Fews Forest, south-west of Armagh, Ireland, in 1975. Some ten years later, “The Strand”
became the object of Heaney’s self-critique in Station Island (1984), where he questions and
arguably condemns his earlier use of poetry as a means of evading (or “whitewash[ing]”, as the
poet has it) the terror and crudity of the Irish “Troubles”.2 Through an analysis of the rich nexus
of intertextual references which constitutes “The Strand”, I suggest that one should question
Heaney’s self-critique, and ask whether his later characterization of the poem as a drawing of
“lovely blinds”3 over “the fact”4 really individuates what is central to the poem. While the
poet’s deliberate integration of medieval narratives into the poem may certainly be read as
effecting the kind of poetic and political evasion which Heaney so unsparingly criticizes, these
very narratives also support a different reading. In particular, I shall argue that although the
poet’s treatment of Colum’s violent death results indeed in a “whitewashing” of facts, this
“whitewashing” rather paradoxically turns out to allow for the uncovering of something that
1
I am thankful to Professor Margery Sabin for helpful comments on a first version of this essay.
2 Seamus Heaney, “Station Island” in Seamus Heaney, Opened Ground. Selected Poems 1966-1996 (New York:
Ferrar Strauss and Giroux, 1998), line 74.
3
Ibid., line 75.
4
Ibid., line 69.
Valley Humanities Review Spring 2015 2
lies beyond the “blood and roadside muck”;5 something distinct from but as valuable as a lucid
appreciation of “facts”: the possibility of assuaging grief through memory, and a capacity to
mourn without despair, pausing in hopeful meditation even when “the facts” would have one
forgo both hope and poetic creation. For the purposes of this essay, my analysis will first focus
on the first and third stanzas; the second stanza will be considered in some detail in the course
of my discussion of the third.
Following the epigraph from Dante’s Purgatorio I,6
the participle clause which opens
“The Strand at Lough Beg” creates an effect of measured, slow-paced motion as well as a
gradual expansion of one’s field of vision in space:
Leaving the white glow of filling stations 1
And a few lonely streetlamps among fields
You climbed the hills towards Newtownhamilton
Past the Fews Forest, out beneath the stars –
Along that road, a high, bare pilgrim’s track 5
From the filling stations to the streetlamps of a landscape that those “fields” characterize
as rural, the distancing motion of the first two lines acquires a subject only at the beginning of
the third, with the poet’s direct address of “[y]ou”. Directed “towards”, moving “past” and
“out”, briefly pausing “beneath” for the time allowed by the strong caesura of line 4 and then
proceeding “along”, the traveler’s varied movement seems to be observed from a bird’s-eye
view which allows a seamless zoom from the fields to Newtownhamilton, and from the forest
to the road. The significance of this perspective will be touched upon later in the essay. More
5 Heaney, “The Strand at Lough Beg” in Opened Ground, line 37.
6 “All round this little island, on the strand/ Far down below there, where the breakers strive,/ Grow the tall
rushes from the oozy sand./ Dante, Purgatorio, I, 100-3” (“The Strand at Lough Beg”, 145).
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important for present purposes, the qualification of “that road” as a “pilgrim’s track” associates
the addressee “you” with the figure of Dante the pilgrim, introducing an intertextual parallel
which will be developed more fully in the last stanza. While the image of the pilgrim is perhaps
too generic, by itself, to justify such a specific identification, the epigraph and a number of
consonances between Inferno I and these lines make the parallel between Heaney’s poem and
Dante’s Commedia conspicuous: like Dante at the beginning of his journey, Colum proceeds past
a forest evocative of the Dantean “dark wood”;7
like Dante, he “climb[s]” the hills at daybreak
along a “high, bare…track” that may remind one of the “desert slope” leading the pilgrim to the
gates of Hell,8 but also of the “cliff so steep” that Dante and Virgil have to climb as they ascend
the terraces of Purgatory.9
 Despite the mitigating impressions of light and spaciousness that the
phrases “out beneath the stars” and “white glow” convey, the overall effect of these references
to the Inferno, compounded with the “loneli[ness]” of the place and the “bare[ness]” of the road,
is one of somberness and slight apprehension. More clearly “infernal” and far more feverish,
however, is the atmosphere created by the lines that follow, where the poet focuses on the
“pilgrim’s track” as the place:
Where Sweeney fled before the bloodied heads,
Goat-beards and dogs’ eyes in a demon pack
Blazing out of the ground, snapping and squealing
7 Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, ed. Matthew Pearl (New York: Modern
Library, 2003), Canto I, line 2.
8 Dante, Inferno, Canto I, line 29.
9 Dante Alighieri, Purgatorio, trans. Jean Hollander and Robert Hollander (New York: Anchor Books, 2004),
Canto III, line 47.
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A legendary Ulster king who lived in the seventh century, Sweeney is the protagonist of
Buile Suibhne, an Irish medieval work probably composed in the ninth century, and first
translated into English in 1913.10 Seventy years later, Heaney himself wrote and published a
second translation titled Sweeney Astray (SA), which he was beginning to revise at the time of
Field Work’s publication.11 After being cursed by a cleric whom he has offended and attempted
to kill, Sweeney goes mad during the battle of Moira, where he is suddenly seized by such
convulsions, “lurchings/ and launchings”, that he drops his weapons and “levitate[s] in a frantic
cumbersome motion/ like a bird of the air”.12 From that moment, Sweeney roams Ireland
“grieving and astray”,13 separated from society by the same “great gulf” he sees yawning
between his “craziness and reason”.14
The flight mentioned in these lines of “The Strand” reproduces a particular episode of
Sweeney Astray: as Sweeney momentarily recovers sound judgment, the cleric Ronan prays– and
is satisfied – that the curse on Sweeney be renewed. Enforcers of this renewed condition of geilt
or madness are five “bleeding headless torsos and disembodied heads –…scraggy, goatbearded”
that appear to Sweeney in the Fews Forest, causing him to flee and startling him into a
new “fit”.15 Lexically indebted to Heaney’s own translation of SA (“snapping”, “squealing” and
10 Conor McCarthy, Seamus Heaney and Medieval Poetry (Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2008), 13-4.
11 Ibid., 16.
12 Seamus Heaney, Sweeney Astray (New York: Ferrar Strauss Giroux, 1983), 9.
13 Ibid., 16.
14 Ibid., 15. Certainly in this wondering figure with a gift for poetic improvisation there is something of the
artist-tramp, a recurrent type in Irish literature. But the character of Sweeney also embodies aspects of the madman
(“geilt”)-hermit or “Christian geilt” who endures extreme privations as a way of expiating sin, while still harboring
feelings of guilt (cf. Hart in McCarthy, Heaney and Medieval Poetry, 21). For a discussion of the possible derivation
of Old English gylt/ gelt (hence “guilt”) from the Irish and Scots Gaelic geilt, see ibid. 20-21.
15 Heaney, Sweeney Astray, 69-70.
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“goat-beards”, for instance, appear in both texts),16 the scene evoked at this point of “The
Strand” materializes the sense of potential danger associated with the lonely wanderer of the
first lines. Further, it provides the poet a way of turning to what seems the central subject of the
stanza – Colum’s murder –, while denying his death the definitiveness of facts in the way
someone might when speculating on “facts” under the impression of vivid presences of fiction.
In the second half of the first stanza, by letting his (lack of) understanding of “facts” be
impressed upon by both fiction and history, the poet creates a ground of encounters and
potential clashes among them all – fiction and history and personal facts, political history and
literary history, memory and poetic invention:
What blazed ahead of you? A faked roadblock?
The red lamp swung, the sudden brakes and stalling 10
Engine, voices, heads hooded and the cold-nosed gun?
Or in your driving mirror, tailing headlights
That pulled out suddenly and flagged you down
Where you weren’t known and far from what you knew:
The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg 15
Church Island’s spire, its soft treeline of yew.
Here the legend infiltrates the poet’s tentative reconstruction of Colum’s assassination
through details such as “heads hooded”, “cold-nosed gun” (a figure that makes the gun
chillingly alive, and that might echo the heads’ “nos[ing]” at Sweeney’s calves and thighs), and
“tailing headlights” reminiscent of Sweeney’s own description of the heads as “five lantern
16 “Bleeding headless torsos and disembodied heads -- five scraggy, goat-bearded heads -- screamed and
bounced this way and that over the road. [...] The heads were pursuing him,/ lolling and baying,/ snapping and
yelping,/ whining and squealing" (Sweeney Astray, 69, emphasis mine).
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ghouls”.17 What one is presented with is the vivid yet fragmented narrative of a vision or
dream; starkly-contoured details drawn in the attempt to answer the uncertainties of a death
that the poet did not witness; and the rendition of a feeling that runs unchanged from the
seventh-century geilt chased after in the Fews to the victim of a political murder of the 1970’s:
the confusion of sights and sounds immediately before the fact (“engine, voices, heads
hooded…”), the “sudden[ness]” of the pursuers’ moves, perhaps even a suggestion of
bewilderment and fear as one imagines Colum looking into the driving mirror and realizing
that he is being pursued. Throughout, death remains impalpable, inferable only from the
commemorative intent of the poem and the violence suggested by these lines, and finally
eluded by the shift of focus that the poet marks with the connective “[w]here”.18 To this
transition from the action of the scene to its geographical reality there seems to correspond a
changed source of pain, which in the last part of the stanza is no longer (or not primarily) the
violence and the fear, but rather Colum’s remoteness from home, his foreignness to the uplands
of the Fews, and a sense of longing for familiar landscapes that is also Sweeney’s as he laments
his farness “from those rushy hillsides, /…from home among the reeds”,19 Dante’s during his
political exile from Florence, and perhaps – as suggested by the caressing tone of lines 15-6 – the
poet’s own.
\*
While one could argue that this convergence of intertextual threads carries Colum’s
figure and death beyond their historical, political and national specificities, exposing what may
17 Ibid., 70, 73.
18 Heaney, “The Strand at Lough Beg”, line 14.
19 Heaney, Sweeney Astray, 22.
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be topical or generally “human” about them (e.g. the experience of violence, loneliness,
displacement), one might also wonder whether the multiple identifications of Colum with the
figures of Sweeney and Dante-pilgrim may not result in a mystified Colum. If “The Strand”
purports to be “in memory of Colum McCartney”,20 how much and what of the individual,
“historical” Colum – as well as of his death – is remembered between the rich intertextual strata
of the poem? Further, should one way of remembering Colum – personal, factual, historical– be
preferred over the other – emblematic, un-historical, sublimating? In a politically troubled
context like the one in which “The Strand” was written, does the poet have a duty to choose
certain forms of poetic representation, and to avoid others?
These are questions that Heaney’s later critique of “The Strand” urges one to consider,
and that he appears to answer at least in part through the accusing words of the revenant
Colum we encounter in section VIII of “Station Island” (Station Island, 1984). “Pale-faced” and
“plastered in mud”,21 Colum first insinuates that the poet’s immediate reaction to the news of
his murder – staying in the company of other poets, “dumb” and unable to act or show any
emotion – was contemptible.22 Then, in response to the poet’s attempt to excuse himself, Colum
addresses more directly the poet’s representation of his death, accusing him of “hav[ing]
confused evasion and artistic tact”.23 In writing “The Strand”, Heaney “whitewashed ugliness
and drew/ the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio/ and saccharined [Colum’s] death with morning
dew’”.24 The poet – Colum/ Heaney seems to imply –is culpable not merely for sentimentalizing
20 Heaney, “The Strand at Lough Beg”, 145.
21 Heaney, “Station Island”, line 52.
22 Ibid., line 64.
23 Ibid., line 70.
24 Ibid., lines 74-6.
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a political death (“the fact”),25 but also for mystifying it by omitting or concealing what was
perhaps its truth – its “ugliness”.26 Since Colum explicitly mentions the Purgatorio in his
accusation, it may be useful to consider Heaney’s ethic and aesthetic self-critique in connection
to the last stanza of “The Strand”, which most explicitly draws upon the first canto of the
Purgatorio:
Across that strand of yours the cattle graze
Up to their bellies in an early mist 30
And now they turn their unbewildered gaze
To where we work our way through squeaking sedge
Drowning in dew. Like a dull blade with its edge
Honed bright, Lough Beg half-shines under the haze.
I turn because the sweeping of your feet 35
Has stopped behind me, to find you on your knees
With blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes,
Then kneel in front of you in brimming grass
And gather up cold handfuls of the dew
To wash you, cousin. I dab you clean with moss 40
Fine as the drizzle out of a low cloud.
I lift you under the arms and lay you flat.
With rushes that shoot green again, I plait
Green scapulars to wear over your shroud.
Opening with the sense of placidity conveyed by the image of cows grazing and
contemplating “unbewildered” the world around them, the stanza recreates from its beginning
the peaceful if muffled atmosphere that characterizes parts of the Purgatorio. Immersed in “an
early mist”, suffused with the “bright[ness]” and shimmering of the waters partially visible
through the “haze”, at first sight the strand might appear as a place of “evasion” from the
25 Ibid., line 69.
26 Ibid., line 74.
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gloom and hellish echoes of the Fews. In contrast with the confusion of sounds we encountered
in the first stanza, silence pervades the scene, broken only by the “squeaking” of rushes and the
“sweeping” of the poet’s and Colum’s feet. Here even death seems ineffectual in producing a
change in atmosphere and mood: as the poet turns to Colum and finds him inexplicably dead,
there follows no abrupt gesture, no sign of what might be expected as a natural reaction of
surprise and discomposure; instead, the knowing controlled acts (“kneel”, “gather up”, “wash”,
“dab”, “lift”) of someone who performs a familiar ritual of purification and deposition.
To anyone acquainted with Purgatorio I, the image of Colum and the poet who “work
[their] way through squeaking sedge”,27 the former being led by the poet, may easily call to
mind Virgil’s exhortation that Dante “follow [his] steps”, and their “anda[r] per lo solingo
piano” (“going along the lonely plane”).28 Now the poet’s ritual gestures deepen this
intertextual connection by evoking one of the crucial moments of the Purgatorio: on a shore
abundant with dew, Virgil “gently spread[s]/ his hands upon the [tender] grass” with which he
removes the grime of hell from Dante’s face.29 Then, symbolizing Dante’s repentant state and
renewed humility that make him ready to continue the ascent, Virgil girds him with a rush that
prodigiously regenerates itself “in the very place where he had plucked it”.30 Although the sort
of purification which the poet performs on Colum might not be religious, it does express a wish
to remove from him the signs of his violent death, with all its “ugliness” and its concreteness as
a historical and political fact. As argued by Colum in “Station Island”, then, one might see the
27 Heaney, “The Strand at Lough Beg”, line 32.
28 Dante, Purgatorio, Canto I, lines 112 and 118.
29 Ibid., Canto I, lines 121-29.
30 Ibid., Canto I, lines 134-6.
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poet as drawing “lovely blinds” on a reality that – the implication seems to be – ought to be
remembered and told as it happened, its truth left untouched by imaginative speculations, or
medieval legends, or beautifying purgatorial dew.
Insofar as the “evasion” of which Colum speaks in “Station Island” is understood as the
poet’s omission of the crudity and “ugliness” of his murder, the final stanza of “The Strand”
clearly constitutes a poetic evasion. However, whether one should see this evasion just as a
reason for criticism, and whether the poet of “The Strand” saw it as a reason for criticism at all,
is not as clear as Colum/ Heaney might have come to think by the time Station Island was
published. A nearly constant presence throughout the poem, the notion of “evasion” that
emerges from “The Strand” includes a number of possible deflections: as a “flight”, the idea of
evasion is first subtly introduced through the bird’s-eye view of lines 1-5; as an escape from
someone or something, “evasion” is Sweeney’s flight from the bloodied heads, as well as
Colum’s (imagined) escape from his pursuers; as a form of evasiveness, it is a choice of
disengagement from action, linked to the marginality that Colum, the poet himself, and their
respective families adopted with respect to “the Troubles”. The latter sense of “evasion”
emerges in particular from the second stanza:
There you once heard guns fired behind the house
Long before rising time, when duck shooters
Haunted the marigolds and bulrushes,
But still were scared to find spent cartridges, 20
Acrid, brassy, genital, ejected,
On your way across the strand to fetch the cows.
For you and yours and yours and mine fought shy,
Spoke an old language of conspirators
And could not crack the whip or seize the day: 25
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Big-voiced scullions, herders, feelers round
Haycocks and hindquarters, talkers in byres,
Slow arbitrators of the burial ground.
If one accepted Corcoran’s qualification of the second half of this stanza as a “rueful
acknowledgment”31 of Colum’s and his family’s incapacity to face the violent reality of the
Troubles, it seems that one would be committed to the view that the poet’s criticism of the idea
and practice of “evasion” long precedes and perhaps prepares his later self-critique of poetic
evasion in Station Island. Thus the question whether the poet of “The Strand” conceives of
evasion in any criticizing sense could be answered in the positive. But it is in fact unclear how
these lines express the poet’s regret or disapproval for the attitude of his cousin’s and his own
family to “the Troubles”. Both families “fought shy”; both “could not crack the whip or seize
the day”. Yet from this what can be inferred with some degree of confidence about the poet’s
own attitude to this incapacity common to both families? The modal “could not” leaves one in
doubt: the poet might mean that they were unable to “crack the whip and seize the day”, but
both could and should have done otherwise; or that they could not have done otherwise,
though they should have done so; or that they should not have done otherwise even in the
event they could have done otherwise. If the metaphors “crack[ing] the whip” and “seiz[ing]
the day” denoted actions or attitudes unequivocally desirable and ethically recommendable, it
would be reasonable to argue that the poet’s judgment of his family’s and Colum’s “evasion”
implies indeed “ruefulness” and disapproval. But while both metaphors suggest sharp, brusque
movements, and qualities of resolve and efficiency which might be in themselves valuable, they
31 Neil Corcoran, A Student’s Guide to Seamus Heaney (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), 136 (emphasis mine).
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also clearly evoke violence, and – at least in the case of “crack[ing] the whip” – unflinching
harshness. Militant Catholics and Protestants, the poet implies, are among those capable of this
resolve, this purposeful hardness – which in the context of “the Troubles” is also a readiness to
kill. The contrast with the poet’s cousin and his family is stark: as the poet remembers in the
first half of the stanza in question, the sight of duck hunters’ cartridges wasted on the ground
sufficed to make Colum “scared” and possibly sick, as suggested by the characterization of
those cartridges as “[a]crid, brassy, genital, ejected”. As for Colum’s family and the poet’s, they
live in a state of insulation from the political and historical developments: speaking “an old
language of conspirators” among themselves, their “conspiracies” are inevitably limited – tribal,
rather than national or broadly sectarian. To the readiness required for “seiz[ing] the day”, they
oppose their measured pace and rhythms of “herders/… talkers in byres”, as well as their
“slow[ness]”, as they uselessly “arbitrat[e]” the only thing that is beyond all need of arbitration–
the “burial ground”.
Thus the question persists: does the poet in any way imply that these “slow arbitrators”
are to be blamed? Should one conclude that the poet implicitly criticizes the kind of “evasion”
which the attitude of the two families exemplifies? Leaving aside one’s personal ethical
assessment of political disengagement – whatever that assessment might be – it seems that the
text itself offers no definite answer. The reason for the poet’s seeming suspension of judgment
in this regard, however, is neither an ‘oversight’ on his part, nor the result of agnosticism with
respect to what one ought to do in times of political trouble. Perhaps “The Strand” neither
criticizes nor endorses political evasion simply because – as the analysis of the third stanza
suggested – the poem is primarily concerned with poetic, rather than political, evasion. Focusing
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again on the third stanza, it is to the poet’s attitude to this notion of poetic evasion that I now
return.
As a possible use of one’s imaginative powers to turn away from something, “evasion”
is of course that which Colum accuses the poet of having misidentified with poetic “tact”32 –
that is, a denial or “whitewashing” of “facts” realized through a weaving of motifs from various
texts. What emerges from the third stanza, however, is an additional sense of “evasion” as a
flight toward, rather than away from something: a move forward – “well out, beyond…”, one
might say echoing “Casualty”, another elegy of Field Work–
33 that suggests a view of poetic
evasion as a means of creating or giving voice to something that is neither less real nor less
worthy than “facts”. Two images in particular convey this constructive view of poetic
“evasion”. First, as the poet “gather[s] up cold handfuls of the dew” to wash his cousin,34

cleaning him with “moss/ Fine as the drizzle out of a low cloud”,35 one might recall that in
section VIII of “Station Island” the poet confesses that he felt “like the bottom of a dried up
lake” when he first heard the news of his cousin’s death.36 Considering Heaney’s recurrent use
of water as a metaphor for poetic discovery and creation (e.g. “watermarking”, “turn[ing] the
windlass at the well of poetry”, “The Diviner”),37 the poet’s gathering of dew might be seen not
only as a fond tribute to Colum, but also as an affirmation of a renewed ability to make poetry,
to find in it a means of assuaging grief, and perhaps even to mitigate a well-established (and
32 Heaney, “Station Island”, line 70.
33 Heaney, “Casualty”, line 108.
34 Heaney, “The Strand at Lough Beg”, line 39.
35 Ibid., lines 40-1.
36 Heaney, “Station Island”, line 68.
37 Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose, 1968-1978, (New York: Ferrar Strauss Giroux, 1980), 47-48.
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excessive?) tendency to self-criticism. In an interview with Frank Kinahan (1982), Heaney
himself recognizes a new element in the poetry of Field Work, namely:
a shift in trust: a learning to trust melody, to trust art as a
reality, to trust artfulness as an affirmation, and not to go into
the self-punishment so much.
38
How does this “shift in trust” relate to the water imagery used in Field Work, and more
particularly in “The Strand”? Here one could point to the water metaphors for poetry-making
mentioned above; but water is perhaps most explicitly associated with the poet’s novel artistic
powers in the elegy “Casualty”, which seems germane to an analysis of “The Strand” in virtue
of a marked affinity to it in both themes and mood. In section III, sketching a landscape
remarkably similar to that of Lough Beg (“…cold sunshine/ On the water, the land/ Banked
under fog”),39 the poet remembers a boat trip with the dedicatee of the elegy:
[…] that morning
When he took me in his boat,
The screw purling, turning 100
Indolent fathoms white,
I tasted freedom with him.
To get out early, haul steadily off the bottom,
Dispraise the catch, and smile
As you find a rhythm 105
Working you, slow mile by mile,
Into your proper haunt
Somewhere, well out, beyond…
38 Seamus Heaney and Frank Kinahan, “An Interview with Seamus Heaney”. (Critical Inquiry 8, no. 3 1982),
412, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1343257.
39 Heaney, “Casualty”, lines 96-8.
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“Casualty” would of course require an analysis by itself; here it may suffice to note how the
poet’s sense of “freedom”, his finding “a rhythm”, and his letting that rhythm “work” upon
him can easily evoke the trustful attitude toward “melody” and “artfulness” which Heaney
mentions in his letter. Particularly relevant to “The Strand” is the fact that this attitude is
associated with a water landscape, in the course of a trip that is yet another “evasion”: in this
case, a long-sighted flight “well out, beyond”, toward a “proper haunt” which – however the
poet might conceive of it – seems the object of a hopeful search propelled by “freedom” and the
workings of an inner “rhythm”. Perhaps one might object that whatever connections between
water and poetic creation might emerge from “Casualty”, they do not necessarily apply to “The
Strand”. Yet, while one should surely grant the latter point, the thematic and stylistic closeness
of the two poems, as well as their belonging to the same collection, are reasons to think that the
“Casualty” associations of water with rhythm, freedom and poetry may plausibly apply to “The
Strand”. Further (if secondary) support to this interpretation of water imagery in “The Strand”
is provided by the Purgatorio, where the washing of Dante’s face and his girding with a rush are
also usually read as a symbolic rebirth of the pilgrim or a new baptism, which closely relates to
the suggestion of a poetic renewal outlined above.40