‘A white bird trapped inside me beating scared wings’ -
Seamus Heaney, his Lost Sibling and Re-Imagining

by Mary Adams

In his long midlife poem, Station Island, Seamus Heaney’s Dantesque journey, a penitential pilgrimage, he imagines a series of meetings with ‘familiar ghosts’, including James Joyce.  Along the way, there is a sudden memory—in the most beautiful poetry--- of a ‘seaside trinket’ that had belonged to his father’s sister who died in her teens. Heaney described secretly looking at the trinket which had the status of a sacred relic, kept in a sideboard in his parent’s bedroom, wrapped in white tissue paper, a little grotto shaped like a sentry box, clad in tiny iridescent seashells.

…pearls condense from a child invalid’s breath
into a shimmering ark, my house of gold
that housed the snowdrop weather of her death
long ago…

…It was like touching birds’ eggs, robbing the nest
of the word wreath, as kept and dry and secret

as her name, which they hardly ever spoke
but was a white bird trapped inside me
beating scared wings….
                                        (1998, p. 248)

Heaney was 45 when he wrote Station Island, still haunted by this lost child. His father, ‘a silent man’, had preserved his sister’s ‘trinket’, perhaps because his parents died young.  Heaney said, ‘I am more and more conscious of him as somebody who was orphaned early on in life. His own father had died suddenly when he was quite young. His mother died of breast cancer.’  Heaney’s father, the silent embodiment of grief, was fostered out to an all-male household of three uncles. (Cole, 1997) 

Heaney himself lost his 4 year old brother, Christopher, while away at boarding school, age 13.  His poem Mid-Term Break describes the death:

…At ten o'clock the ambulance arrived
With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops
And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him
For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,
He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.
No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four-foot box, a foot for every year.  (1998, p. 12)

A later poem, The Blackbird of Glanmore, describes a happier image of his brother ‘frolicking on the grass…an image that stayed with me forever’ (O’D, p. 408):

And I think of one gone to him,
A little stillness dancer—
Haunter-son, lost brother –
Cavorting through the yard,
So glad to see me home,

My homesick first term over.  (District and Circle)

Heaney here refers to a ‘haunter-son, lost brother’. ”For years I have been writing poems where I meet ghost/shades”, he said.  Those poems were among his ‘most cherished and valued’. He spoke of always being affected by poems of lost children. (Reid p. 673)

Much has been written about Heaney growing up a Catholic in Northern Ireland during the most turbulent and violent times.  But there is little about the family’s private trauma losing their four year old child, something which would have deeply affected every member of the family.  We are increasingly aware of the effects such a loss can have on surviving siblings.  ‘A white bird trapped inside me beating scared wings’ is surely among the most powerful of images of the persistent presence of grief and confusion in a surviving sibling. ‘Like an absence stationed in the swamp-fed air’, he wrote.

Survivor Guilt

Among the difficulties often experienced by a replacement child are fears they caused the sibling’s death—an unconscious, unexplained fear that can leave them feeling they should not exist when the sibling had died.  I have described the pervasive sense of guilt that plagued James Joyce, whose parents lost their first child, and the crippling nightmares that reinforced his fears. (2022)  Heaney expressed a sense of persecution in his poem, The Haw Lantern:

…But sometimes when your breath plumes in the frost
it takes the roaming shape of Diogenes
with his lantern, seeking one just man;
so you end up scrutinized from behind the haw
he holds up at eye-level on its twig,
and you flinch before its bonded pith and stone,
its blood-prick that you wish would test and clear you,
its pecked-at ripeness that scans you, then moves on.  (p. 299)

He hasn’t spoken openly about nightmares but identifies with Macbeth in the poem Keeping Going:

That scene, with Macbeth helpless and desperate
In his nightmare – when he meets the hags again
And sees the apparitions in the pot---
I felt at home with that one all right  (p. 400)

James Joyce as a young man hid his fears and paranoia with arrogance and mockery.  Heaney, by contrast, was more dutiful and self-deprecating---'Being responsible has indeed preoccupied me’ he said. (Reid, p. 664)  Helen Vendler described his ‘enlarged adult capacity for empathy’ (p. 83) and we can see from his Letters how generously he gave in friendships.  Prone to guilt, his letters mostly begin with apologies for not writing sooner.  They are beautifully crafted, entertaining and full of praise for the recipients, but they give little sense of his own inner state---that is reserved for the poetry.  His more personal letters are kept private.  He formed strong bonds with other male poets, including Czesław Milosz, Ted Hughes and those he knew in Northern Ireland, and must have wept when Milosz and Hughes died, for example, but it is not in his letters.  ‘I tend to clam and flip when discussion gets personal’. (Reid, p. 671)    

James Joyce remained a vivid presence for Heaney all his life---in my fantasy, communing with him like a lost brother?  There is something deeply moving about this affinity and identification with Joyce and it is no surprise that he imagines looking to Joyce for guidance and ‘to help my unbelief’ on his journey in Station Island:

I needed to butt my way through a blockage, a pile-up of hampering stuff, everything that had gathered inside me…. to have it out with myself, to clear the head, if not the decks. (O’D, p.235)

Heaney refers to Station Island as ‘an examination of conscience---a kind of inner courtroom’. I make much of Joyce’s poignant courtroom scenes in both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake as he externalised his own sense of guilt. Heaney’s poems are full of self-examination, his ‘inner courtroom’.

Both men suffered the legacy of a devout Catholic upbringing. Heaney said, ‘from first awareness until at least the early teens, I dwelt in the tomb of religion.  Naturally I went on to school myself as best I could from catechised youth into secular adult.’  (Reid, pp. 672-3)  Like Joyce, Heaney was the eldest in a large family, was exceptionally bright and went away to a Catholic boarding school at a young age, homesick for his ever-pregnant mother, calling pregnancy ‘a killing disease’: 

I could see that religion was a powerful compensation for her. There she was, doomed to biology, a regime without birth control, nothing but parturition and potato peeling in saecula saeculorum. (O’D, p. 39) 

Heaney’s first poems used the pseudonym, Incertus (the uncertain one).  He refers to his own ‘inner émigré’ while Joyce described being ‘exiled in on himself’. They both described an inner loneliness and dislocation, a feeling common in replacement children.  In Portrait of an Artist, Joyce has Stephen say about his family:

He felt that he was hardly of the one blood with them but stood to them rather in the mystical kinship of fosterage, foster child and foster brother. (P, p. 105)

Heaney’s poem, Exposure, has a similar feel:

How did I end up like this?
I often think of my friends'
Beautiful prismatic counselling
And the anvil brains of some who hate me

As I sit weighing and weighing
My responsible tristia.

…I am neither internee nor informer;
An inner emigre, grown long-haired
And thoughtful; a wood-kerne

Escaped from the massacre,
Taking protective colouring
From bole and bark, feeling
Every wind that blows;   ( p. 143)
 

He describes an image of himself ‘in the middle of a space that is separate and a little sorrowing’:

…as the animula, the little soul alone.  Or the image from Plato’s parable…of the soul at birth separated from its other half, and seeking and yearning for it ever after….I have a sense of being close to that unsatisfied, desiring, lonely, inner core.  It – or he ---hasn’t disappeared but nowadays he dwells farther in, behind all kinds of socialized defences, barriers he learned to put up. (O’D, p. 31)

         ‘He dwelt in himself/like a rook in an unroofed tower’
                                                                   (The Master, 280)

           
In his letters he mentions not wanting to publicise the fact that he refused to take communion at his mother’s funeral---strongly echoing Joyce’s refusal with his mother. (Reid, p. 649)  In Ulysses, Stephen is famously accused by Buck Mulligan for refusing his mother’s dying wish:

You could have knelt down, damn it Kinch, when your dying
mother asked you. . . . To think of your mother begging you with
her last breath to kneel down and pray for her. And you refused.
There is something sinister in you. . . . (U, p. 4)

The attachment of both men to their overworked, always pregnant and then terminally ill mothers was a source of profound grief.  It is not clear if either of them would have survived, certainly not as successfully or happily, if they had not found such lively and devoted wives, Nora and Marie.

The Wives

‘With Marie I was sited that bit better in life’

This was Heaney’s (typically understated) comment about Marie, his wife of 48 years, his ‘braveheart lady lionhearted as ever.’ (Reid, p. 386)  Joyce must have felt the same about the remarkable constant in his life, Nora, a beauty ‘barely powdered by the years, patient, gentle… with whom cheerfulness predominated’.  Louis Menand wrote:

Joyce had known only prostitutes and proper middle-class girls.  Nora was something new, an ordinary woman who treated him as an ordinary man. The moral simplicity of what happened between them seems to have stunned him.  It was elemental, a gratuitous act of loving that had not involved flattery or deceit, and that was unaccompanied by shame or guilt. That simplicity became the basis of their relationship. (Adams p. 28)

Unlike Nora, Heaney’s wife was well educated.  Always his first reader, she had a ‘good sense of what rang true’.  He said:

Marie has always been a buoyant spirit.  There’s a terrific readiness about her.  She has this great combination of spontaneity and staying power, so no doubt she’d have been a match for things no matter how they turned out. …She enjoyed the school where she was teaching in County Down and enjoyed her colleagues…she was fulfilled by the job – which is to say she was good at it and felt good in herself as a result. (O’D, p. 63-4).

‘The ould doll hard at the legends’, was his description of her writing her own book, Over Nine Waves. For all the deep friendships Joyce and Heaney had with male writers, Nora and Marie---both independent Irish spirits---remained their lifelong indispensable companions and support.

Station Island and the freedom of Sweeney

In his youth, Heaney did in fact make the pilgrimage to Station Island – three times! – as well as going to Lourdes.  He acknowledged that Joyce ‘would never have walked those nineteenth-century Catholic roads or put up with the murmurs and the mea culpas of the island’, so it is fitting that he called on Joyce to free him. Ulysses is a secular Odyssey—a lonely quest to escape a general paralysis and inner persecution.  I previously described Joyce’s remarkable escape from the ‘sorrow’ of Ulysses---a world without forgiveness---to the new intimacy and concern in the dreamworld of Finnegans Wake, so I was amazed to see a similar development in Heaney with his flight from the self-examining Station Island to the freedom of Mad Sweeney, the legendary Irish king who was turned into a bird-man and condemned to live in the trees for slaying a psalmist. ‘I always had the hope that I’d get as free as Sweeney’, he said. (DD p. 236)  He has Joyce tell him:

The main thing is to write
for the joy of it...And don't be so earnest,

let others wear the sackcloth and the ashes.
Let go, let fly, forget. You've listened long enough. Now strike your note.  (p. 267-8)

And Heaney does indeed ‘let fly’. In his next section of the poem, Sweeney Redivivus, Sweeney is ‘defying the constraints of religious, political and domestic obligation‘.  ‘I felt up and away, at full tilt a far more confident and unapologetic tone…capable of muck-raking and self-mockery,’ says a new Heaney.

In this popular medieval Irish myth 'Buile Suibhne,' Sweeney is cursed by a Christian cleric named Ronan whom he has insulted and humiliated. As a result, he becomes a mad outcast, a paranoid fugitive from life, a shifty victim of panic who lives on watercress and water and is driven to the tops of trees, from which vantage point he gazes down, terrified yet furiously articulate. From the heights of his mad, paranoid agony, Sweeney makes sad, beautiful, thrilling poems. He is the voice of darkness and nightmare but also, in his naked and ravaged loneliness, the celebrant of the natural beauty of Ireland.

Epilogue

Seamus Heaney, who experienced first-hand violent sectarian strife in Northern Ireland, was a long-time supporter of the Palestinian cause and a patron of the Palestine Festival of Literature. In his 1995 Nobel lecture, Crediting Poetry, he spoke hopefully of Israeli-Palestinian rapprochement.

…In spite of devastating and repeated acts of massacre, assassination and extirpation, the huge acts of faith which have marked the new relations between Palestinians and Israelis, Africans and Afrikaners, and the way in which walls have come down in Europe and iron curtains have opened, all this inspires a hope that a new possibility can still open up in Ireland as well.  (460)

Following the siege of Gaza in 2009 he protested publicly against the bombing.  How would he have coped with the killing happening in Gaza today.  As he said in Keeping Going:

That old sense of tragedy going on
Uncomprehended, at the very edge
Of the usual, it never left me once…   (400)  

I will end with the beautiful analysis by Fintan O’Toole of the crucial role of the imagination, like Heaney’s poems, in the move towards the Belfast Peace Agreement: 

There is a final political movement in Heaney’s poems that chimes with the broader imaginative shift that eventually led to the Belfast Peace Agreement. At the heart of that agreement is an attempt to move away from ideas of political sovereignty based on two irreconcilable claims (British and Irish) to the territory of Northern Ireland and toward an acceptance that sovereignty exists in people’s minds, in history, culture, community, and allegiance. It is a shift, in essence, from the physical reality of the land to the imaginative reality of human memories and desires.  That power to transform things as they are into things as they might be conceived is the poet’s true property. In a dark time, Heaney has held open a space for the imagination by showing that people are not necessarily prisoners of the physical reality that seems to doom them to conflict. He has turned borders and dividing lines into rich frontiers. (1999, NYRB)

For both Seamus Heaney and James Joyce, using their imagination was fundamental in combatting an inner turmoil, some of it produced perhaps by the soul-destroying phantasies of the replacement child.  In their prose and their poetry, they could re-imagine and create a distance from their fears and their pain, as one does in psychoanalysis---the ‘white bird trapped inside’ could be released.

© Mary Adams, 2024

References

Adams, M. (2022). James Joyce and the Internal World of the Replacement Child, Routledge.

Cole, H.  (1997).   Seamus Heaney, The Art of Poetry No. 75. Issue 144, Paris Review.

Heaney, S. (1998). Opened Ground:  Poems 1966 –1996.

Heaney, S. (2006).  District and Circle.

Joyce, J. (2000).  Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Penguin Modern Classics.

Joyce, J. (1960/80). Ulysses. Bodley Head.

O’Driscoll, D. (2009). Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney,  Faber & Faber.

O’Toole, F. (1999).  New York Review of Books.

Reid, C. ed. (2023). The Letters of Seamus Heaney, Faber & Faber.

Vendler, H. (1998).  Seamus Heaney, Harvard University Press.