A Cold Eye Cast Inward: Seamus Heaney's Field Work

Biographically and poetically, Field Work () represents Seamus Heaney’s withdrawal from Northern Ireland. Biographically, the poems in this collection center around the poet’s move from Belfast to County Wicklow in the Republic. Accompanying this change in location is a radical change in the nature poet’s public life. Prior to the move, Heaney had been a teacher at Queen’s University, Belfast, and an outspoken advocate against the British presence in Ireland; in Wicklow, distanced from the center of Irish political unrest, Heaney devoted himself entirely to poetry, and largely dropped out of the public political sphere.1 The personal upheaval which resulted in and from this moment of change is reflected poetically in the subject matter and structure of Field Work, especially when compared to North (), Heaney’s previous volume. In , two years after the publication of North, Heaney described his poetry as a “slow, obstinate papish burn.”2 In , reflecting on the years he spent writing Field Work, Heaney offers a much less politically charged focus for his art: “Those years [. . .] were an important growth time when I was asking myself the proper function of poets and poetry and learning a new commitment to the art.”3 Simply put, the poet’s attitude seems to have shifted from “art for Ireland’s sake” to “art for art’s sake.” Heaney’s dissatisfaction with his previous attempts to positively engage the conflict in Northern Ireland with his poetry, accounts for much of the sense of retreat that propels Field Work. The openly, darkly political poetry in North reflects an active attempt by Heaney to use his poetry to explain and resolve the violence around him. Field Work begins by demonstrating the failure of this attempt and ends with the poet finding a new, apolitical paradigm for his poetry. In the title poem of the collection, a microcosm for the collection itself, this new paradigm emerges and Heaney’s retreat ends. However—as the final