Études irlandaises

Seamus Heaney and the Alchemy of the Earth

George Morgan

Citer ce document / Cite this document :

Morgan George. Seamus Heaney and the Alchemy of the Earth. In: Études irlandaises, n°14-1, 1989. pp. 127-136;

doi : https://doi.org/10.3406/irlan.1989.2515

https://www.persee.fr/doc/irlan_0183-973x_1989_num_14_1_2515

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Abstract
Heaney's poetry can be seen as a search for an essence through a process of physical and spiritual
metamorphosis. His poems frequently involve representations reminiscent of the alchemical opus
transforming impure and disparate elements into purity and harmony. A number of poems, including
"Churning Day" and "Gallarus Oratory", are analysed to show how these images represent the process
of psychic individuation and the act of poetic creation. Erotic imagery is also shown to relate to the
myth of Mother Earth and to Heaney's desire for a union of sexual opposites on a psychic and cultural
plane. The "bog poems" are reviewed in the light of alchemy and the Earth Goddess myth and are
shown to be attempts to heal the split consciousness of male and female awareness in a centre which,
unlike Yeats's disintegrating vision, now "holds and spreads".

Résumé
La poésie de Heaney peut être perçue comme la quête d'une essence au terme d'une métamorphose
physique et spirituelle. Ses poèmes comprennent souvent des représentations symboliques qui
rappellent l'oeuvre alchimique avec ses transformations d'éléments impurs et disparates en pureté et
en harmonie. Plusieurs poèmes, dont « Churning Day » et « Gallarus Oratory », sont analysés afin de
montrer comment ces images représentent le process d'individuation psychique de même que l'acte de
création poétique. Les métaphores érotiques sont également étudiées en relation avec l'image de la
Tèrre-Mère et avec le désir, chez Heaney, de réconciliation des opposés sexuels sur un plan
psychique et culturel. Les « poèmes des tourbières » sont analysés à la lumière du processus
alchimique ainsi que du mythe de la Terre-Mère afin de montrer leur fonctionnement comme tentatives
de guérison d'un esprit divisé entre les consciences masculine et féminine en un centre qui, à la
différence de la vision yeatsienne de la désintégration, « tient et s'étend ».
 SEAMUS HEANEY AND THE ALCHEMY OF EARTH

George MORGAN
(Université de Nice)

Any point in that wood

Was a centre, birch trunks
Ghosting your bearings
Improvising charmed rings
Wherever you stopped...
("The Plantation", Door into the Dark)

The search for an essence, concealed within some awesome and forbidden
centre, runs through much of Heaney's work, particularly in the early volumes,
underpinning the very processes of his poetic creation. His imaginative
focusing on the world of reality be it birch wood, barn, burial mound,
blacksmith's forge or well penetrates and ultimately opens up a magic dimension
connecting the world of sense and an extra-sensorial dimension. In an
autobiographical essay, "Mossbawn", Heaney has related just such an
from his own childhood. It describes a mysterious ceremonial where
an initiatory fusion with earth and water produces a metamorphosis within
the growing boy:

To this day, green, wet corners, flooded wastes, soft rushy bottoms, any
place with the invitation of watery ground and tundra vegetation, even
glimpsed from a train or a car, possess an immediate and deeply peaceful
attraction. It is as if I am betrothed to them, and I believe my betrothal
happened one summer evening, thirty years ago, when another boy and
myself stripped to the white country skin and bathed in a moss-hole,
treading the liver-thick mud, unsettling a smoky muck off the bottom and
coming out smeared and weedy and darkened. We dressed again and
went home in wet clothes, smelling of the ground and the standing pool,
somehow initiated.
{Preoccupations, p. 19) (1)

As suggested here, Heaney' s imagination works not merely on a sensorial

level but in terms of symbols, seeking correspondances signs, meanings,
hidden in physical reality, but revealing the psychic and spiritual dimension
128 GEORGE MORGAN

of man himself. A skinny dip becomes a form of baptism and a ritual

marriage with the Earth Goddess, the archetypal roots of fertility, leaving the
poet, despite his darkened skin, cleaner, wiser, in harmony with himself and
with the world. This kind of transformation is a key to much of what is
central to Heaney's poetic processes. Heaney clings to the world, to the
physicality of sod, water, wood, but his eye is carried through the purely
sensorial to a state where reality and spirituality fuse to produce the sense of
a higher, more intense reality. If all poetry, to recall Rimbaud, is a form of
alchemy, Heaney's, more precisely, involves an alchemy of earth.
As I intend this reference to the alchemist's art in more than a figurative
way, it is worth dwelling a moment on the alchemical process, an area which
has been much investigated and rehabilitated in our century through the works
of Carl Jung, Mircea Eliade and others. Alchemy is not, as is sometimes
thought, a crude precursor of modern chemistry. Nor can it, except in
symbolical representations, be reduced to an attempt to transmute base metals
into gold. The aim of the alchemical opus was primarily a spiritual, today
we might say psychic, quest, to raise the disparate elements of experience
into coherence. The philosopher's stone and alchemical gold were symbolic
expressions of the coniunctio or fusion of opposites in which impurity was
resolved into purity and the divided mind into a harmonious marriage of
opposites. The alchemist was holistic, reverential, haunted by the beauty of
his materials and by their power to lift his mind to purity, union, and order.
Bearing this in mind, I would like to look at several of Heaney's poems
to illustrate the two-fold functioning of alchemy in his work, firstly as reference
and image, and secondly and more importantly, as the process underpinning
his poetic quest. The poem entitled "Churning-Day", too long, unfortunately,
to be quoted in full, describes butter-making on the farm. A great event in
itself, it is described in terms of a religious celebration or ritual in which
milk, the fruit of the earth, is raised to the status of butter by a long and
arduous process of transformation. But it is as a symbol of the alchemical
process, almost perfectly reproduced in the poem, that the butter-making
assumes its full meaning. In the opening sections, the curdled buttermilk
standing in four earthenware crocks is scrupulously prepared, placed in chums
and studiously worked upon for hours:

A thick crust, coarse-grained as limestone rough-cast,

hardened gradually on top of the four crocks
that stood, large pottery bombs, in the small pantry.
After the hot brewery of gland, cud and udder
cool porous earthenware fermented the buttermilk for churning day,
when the hooped churn was scoured
with plumping kettles and the busy scrubber
echoed daintily on the seasoned wood.
It stood then, purified, on the flagged kitchen floor.

The four crocks could well represent the four elements involved in the
alchemical work, or the four stages of the alchemical process. This process
 SEAMUS HEANEY AND THE ALCHEMY OF EARTH 129

begins with the nigredo or black work in which matter is fermented or broken
down by the alchemist in his crucible just as the buttermilk is separated in
the dairy-churn. After a stage in which the milk is purified, it then emerges,
in the albedo or white stage of the work, as light, or gold, bright, dense and
transmuted:

Finally gold flecks

Began to dance... suddenly
A yellow curd was weighting the churned up white,
heavy and rich, coagulated sunlight
that they fished, dripping in a wide tin strainer,
heaped up like gilded gravel in a bowl.
(Death of a Naturalist)

The alchemical transformation of butter-milk into golden butter is not

merely a metaphor to illustrate or decorate the verse. It is a mental and
spiritual process which affects the butter-makers, and, for that matter, the
reader, who reads the poem itself as a process of metamorphosis of the raw
material of language into order and beauty. The butter, when laid out in
"soft printed slabs", is the symbol of the poem itself. And when the poet
writes at the end of the poem "our brains turned crystals full of clean deal
churns", we realize it is a mental transformation which has occurred, the
ordering and the purifying of the creative mind which, through the alchemical
work of dissolution, solution and conjunction has espoused the unifying
processes of matter.
I will not dwell on the theoretical side of alchemy, but it seems to me
that the vocabulary and the processes of the alchemical work recur in virtually
all of the poems in which Heaney deals with the earth and particularly in the
"bog poems". Significantly, the term "alchemy" derives, it is thought, from
an Arabic word signifying "black earth" and referred to the black, life-giving
silts of the Nile on whose banks alchemy is believed to have originated. Whether
Heaney was aware of this etymology, or whether he is familiar with alchemy
at all, is irrelevant. The sensitivity and depth of his poetic vision are such
that he has unearthed, in the rich black soils of his native bogs, the archetypal
symbolism and spiritual patterns which the Egyptians derived from their
experience of the fertile mud on the shores of the Nile.
The alchemical process, at all events, underpins Heaney's entire quest
for self-fulfilment, harmony and transmutation. I will quote another poem,
"In Gallarus Oratory", in which the alchemical work combines a Christian
setting and a pagan cult of Mother Earth to produce a brilliant image of
metamorphosis, spiritual death and mystical rebirth:

You can still feel the community pack

This place: it's like going into a turf stack,
A core of old dark walled up with stone
A yard thick. When you're in it alone
130 GEORGE MORGAN

You might have dropped, a reduced creature,

To the heart of the globe. No worshipper
Would leap up to his God off this floor.
Founded there like heroes in a barrow
They sought themselves in the eye of their King
Under the black weight of their own breathing.
And how he smiled on them as out they came,
The sea a censer, and the grass a flame.
{Door into the Dark)

One recognizes here the subliminal structuring of images so characteristic

of Heaney: the doorway into a dark inner space, a centre or core enclosed
within the earthy confines of turf heaped up like a chapel. Then the separation
or division of the alchemical nigredo where the poet imagines himself divided
or reduced to nothingness at the centre of the earth ("a reduced creature... the
heart of the globe"). At this point, the poem suggests a spiritual death, the
separation of man from God. Yet, seen positively, this descent into earth
marks a new beginning, the foundation of a new man ("Founded there like
heroes in a barrow"), the barrow referring of course to a primitive burial
mound. It involves the encounter with the source of creation and energy,
the King who is Christ but also the alchemical king, the source of
Finally, there is the image of the door as threshold into a new dimension
as the monks reemerge and discover the world anew ("out they came/ The
sea a censer, and the grass a flame"), elevated in images suggestive of some
mystical reworking of the natural world by a divine energy. Notice, too, one
other important transformation, that of language itself, from the rough and
tumble colloquial style of the first lines across the threshold of silence signified
by the blank space in the centre to the exalted, visionary quality of the final
images. For the poet, language, after all, is the ultimate alchemy, the
of the prima materia of word, image and syntax into the living substance
of the poem.

In poetry, as in alchemy, sexual metaphor is synonymous with the work

of metamorphosis. The alchemist, when not engaged in symbolizing his
quest in terms of metal and the philosopher's stone, expressed his work in
images of erotic conjunction, the coition of sexual extremes blending the
alchemical King and Queen to produce a creature of unity, the bi-sexual
all-unifying hermaphrodite. Carl Jung has explained this process to some
extent by his division of the human mind into masculine and female principles
which he calls animus and anima. Animus, in a word, represents the diurnal,
rational, pragmatic and positive pole of our awareness; the anima, the nocturnal,
intuitive, imaginative, passive and creative side.
 SEAMUS HEANEY AND THE ALCHEMY OF EARTH 131

Heaney himself willingly recognizes the sexual element within the poetic
act: "Poetry", he writes, "is a kind of somnambulist encounter between
masculine will and feminine clusters of image and emotion..." (Preoccupations
p. 34). His poetry bristles with sexual references, though few poems are
explicitly devoted to Eros. I would suggest that sexuality is most often a
symbolic expression of his quest to bring together the divided sections of his
mind, to bind together, on the one hand, the thinking, feeling, adult man,
committed to conscious existence in time and space and, on the other, the
dark, penetrable but unfathomable depths of mother-earth, symbol of memory,
imagination and cosmic creation. Digging, delving, groping through the
earth, and all the archeological activity Heaney indulges in are expressions
of his love affair with the Earth Goddess, viewed as a cosmic bride. When
Heaney expressed his intention, in "Digging", to dig with his pen, he may
or may not have had in mind the etymological and Freudian proximity of pen
and penis. But when he writes "Poem", an early lyrical piece dedicated to
his wife, he plays on three different levels of erotic suggestion: the traditional
conjugal union, an erotic address to Mother Earth and finally a fusion of the
adult conscious poet who says "I" and the memory of the child buried deep
within his brain, symbol of his poetic inspiration, indeed of the poem itself,
his creation:

Love I shall perfect for you the child

Who diligently potters in my brain
Digging with heavy spade till sods were piled
Or puddling through muck in a deep drain.
("Death of a Naturalist")

In this poem, as in others, sexual fusion and gestation are expressions

not merely, or even principally, of erotic activity, but provide symbols of the
psychic fusing of opposites which is the key to the alchemical process of
transformation and transcendence at the core of Heaney 's imaginative quest. After
a number of verses evoking the child's unsuccessful attempts to build walls
of clay to keep out the winter rain, the poem ends with an alchemical image
of metamorphosis in which the poet, now playing the passive or feminine
role, surrenders himself up to the powers of creation which will transform
imperfection into perfection, clay into gold:

Love, you shall perfect for me this child

Whose small imperfect limits would keep breaking:
Within new limits now, arrange the world
Within our walls, within our golden ring.

There are a number of poems, and among his best, in which Heaney,
or at least the person who says "I" in his poems, identifies with a female
character, real or mythical, who is portrayed in this way as the creative
132 GEORGE MORGAN

principle of earth. "The Wife's Tale", "Bog Queen", "Punishment", among

others, all attest to this propensity for fusion with the dark queen of the earth,
symbol, as we have seen, not only of his personal subconscious, but of a
vast racial and archetypal memory. I would like, to close this incursion into
sex, to examine just one more poem: "Undine" from Death of a
Here, the speaker, Heaney's persona as it were, is a female water
sprite. She tells how the farmer with his spade clears his ditches so that she
can run free and clear irrigating the land, running up into the corn and achieving
sexual union with him through his crops, and so become humanized
Here are the concluding stanzas:

... he dug a spade deep in my flank

And took me to him. I swallowed his trench
Gratefully, dispersing myself for love
Down in his roots, climbing his brassy grain -
But once he knew my welcome, I alone
Could give him subtle increase and reflection.
He explored me so completely, each limb
Lost its cold freedom. Human, warmed to him.

This myth of course is once again an expression of the broader myth of

Mother Earth, the fecundating life-force present in the ground and in water. At
the same time, it is once again an alchemical expression of transmutation. The
grey silt of the opening line and the rust carried by the water are purified,
after descent into the dark spaces of the trench, into the hard, fertile "brassy
grain", expression of the union of creative seed of feminine imagination and
the fruits of man's own labour. Moreover the initial syllables of "brassy
grain", when reversed provide a spoonerism, "grassy brain", both images
suggesting a fusion of man and earth, the masculine mind and the female life
principle.

Heaney, I have suggested, learned young the bewitching attraction of

bog and wood, the dark, deep spaces of his childhood landscape which
crystallised as landscapes of his mind. There is little doubt however that
acquired cultural patterns shaped and influenced his perception of earth as
bride and mother. The cult of an Earth goddess goes far back into Celtic,
and even pre-Celtic history. Known under a wide variety of names, Dana,
Cailleach, Morrigan and Anna, she is the Celtic equivalent of the classical
goddess Artemis, the great mother earth or female principle holding the earth
and all animal life under her control. The pagan cult has survived to modern
times, most obviously perhaps in the veneration paid to the Virgin Mary,
 SEAMUS HEANEY AND THE ALCHEMY OF EARTH 133

frequently represented with the world beneath her feet. But as Heaney himself
has pointed out, in Ireland, the female principle takes many forms, what he
calls "an indigenous territorial numen, a tutelar of the whole island, call her
Mother Ireland, Kathleen Ni Houlihan, the poor old woman, the Shan Van
Vocht, Whatever". However, the sovereignty of the female principle within
the matrilineal Irish world view has been distorted or usurped in more recent
times by what he calls "a new male cult whose founding fathers were
Cromwell, William of Orange and Edward Carson, and whose godhead is
incarnate in a rex or caesar resident in a palace in London" {Preoccupations,
p. 57). A remark which sets Heaney's alchemy of earth in a context which
is political as much as it is metaphysical.
Heaney's long-standing devotion to the bog and its tutelary spirits received
fresh impetus and greater poetic definition in 1969, when he discovered a
book entitled "The Bog People". The author, a Danish archeologist, P.V. Glob,
described in detail the finding of bodies in the peat-bogs of Jutland in
Denmark. The bodies which had been scientifically dated to the 4th Century
of our era were often perfectly intact though tanned and blackened by the
preservative effect of iron contained in the bog-water. What excited Glob
- and Heaney - most however was that these bodies were shown to be the
remains of sacrificial victims who had been executed and placed in the sacred
bed of the bog to lie with the Mother Goddess in order to ensure fertility at
the coming spring. Some of the victims - who had been hung, or had their
throats cut - were found to have over 60 different types of spring grass seed
in their stomachs. Heaney was struck by the awesome and sometimes
beauty of these bodies, their features transformed by a natural alchemical
process from dead flesh to the stylised and polished forms of art. Some of
his finest poems are attempts to render these heads and bodies, like the gentle
sleeping features of the Tollund Man:

... his peat-brown head,

The mild pods of his eye-lids,
His pointed skin cap.
("The Tollund Man", Wintering Out)

But the Tollund man, the Grauballe man and the others were more to
Heaney than just aesthetically exciting plastic forms. They were also
of a form of total worship of the Mother Earth reminiscent of his own
ancestral Celtic traditions, of a world of ceremony and ritual in which, in
contrast with the barbarity of the killings which had flared up again in Northen
Ireland in that same year 1969, sacrificial death was accepted, even sought
after by the victims, as the price of love and life. What Heaney most
admired, let me hasten to add, was not the violence itself, but the religious
and ceremonial world view, the dedication to the female principle of Earth
which gave meaning and order to existence and which promised new life
even in death, in which beauty and atrocity, like Yeats'"terrible beauty", are
held in the scales.
134 GEORGE MORGAN

"The Grauballe Man" provides one instance of the verse Heaney forged
out ôf this new vein of inspiration. The poem describes the body as it lies,
apparently asleep, as black as tar, the different parts as hard as basalt, but
gleaming with reflected light. The body in fact becomes as earth, identifies
totally with the ground which receives it. He describes the slashed throat,
the opening into the brain, "the dark elderberry place", and then the head
like a foetus, twisted in childbirth. But, once again, the poem is more than
description. It is a process, both alchemical and mythical, in which victim
becomes hero, and death the tool of resurrection. The pattern of the poem
follows a sequence leading from the pillow of turf and sleep downwards into
swamp and bog, into the glisten of mud, into the dark space which is the
underworld of earth and of extinction. But it is from this place, in a final
twist perfected by the poet's memory, that the body becomes the symbol of
a new birth, a new awareness, a resurrection as though of a baby, perfect
even down to the fleshy horn of his finger-nails:

...but now he lies

perfected in my memory,
down to the red horn
of his nails,
hung in the scales
with beauty and atrocity.
("The Grauballe Man", North)

In the bog victims, Heaney discovered a perfect image of the heroic

male spirit of which he dreamed, of the willingness and ability to merge into
the recesses of earth and death, to fuse with the great Earth Mother, just as
he had in the moss-pond as a child. And in one poem after another, he
identifies in imagination with this mythic pattern of descent, death, communion
and renewal. In so doing, he not only reiterates the tribal customs of his
Celtic forbears, plunging as it were into the depths of history below the bog
floor, he also explores a metaphor of his own personal attempt to heal the
split consciousness of male and female awareness. For in Heaney' s best
poems, he identifies simultaneously with both the male and female spirit, the
questing masculine mind and the waitful, fertile depths of the soul, of
Earth. Through the image of the bog and the descent into its watery
underworld, he finds a new centre of being in which contraries are weighed,
juxtaposed and resolved in a dream of unity. Moreover, the act of poetic
creation itself is contained within this vision of complicity between the world
of light and reason and the depths of the inner self, symbolized by the
earth. Heaney has written: "I have always listened for poems, they come
sometimes like bodies out of the bog, almost complete, seeming to have been
laid down a long time ago, surfacing with a touch of mystery" {Preoccupations
P. 34).
I will quote from Section 4 of "Kinship" to illustrate my argument. The
title itself is eloquent of Heaney's sense of closeness to the bog he is about
 SEAMUS HEANEY AND THE ALCHEMY OF EARTH 135

to evoke. He is of the earth. The poem then brings together many of the
themes and images we have been reviewing. The bog as centre, but a centre
which expands to cover all reality; the bog as a place of destruction but also
a seed-bed, a place of birth, a bag of waters like the amniotic fluids of the
womb. Death, fermentation, and dissolution are then followed by a new
birth, new seed, the alchemical transformation of husk and leaf into the bronze
of bracken in blossom. Out of death comes new birth, and from new life
new death, and then new life like the eternal circle of nature itself, like the
tree which drops its fruit upon the earth only to grow again out of its fermented
flesh:

This centre holds

and spreads,
sump and seedbed,
a bag of waters
and a melting grave.
The mothers of autumn
sour and sink,
ferments of husk and leaf
deepen their ochres.
Mosses come to a head,
heather unseeds,
brackens deposit
their bronze.
("Kinship", North)

Coming"
The opening
in whichlines
he prophecies
cannot failthe
to centrifugal
recall Yeats'
eruption
s lines of
in civilization
"The Second as
we know it:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, (2)

The temptation might be to see the current troubles in Northen Ireland

as the fulfilment of that prophecy. Heaney, however, whilst not seeking to
evade or romanticize the political issue, offers an alternative to this disintegration
of our world. As "Kinship" shows, his is a world in which the power of
the imagination can transform division and decay into unity and fertility:

mutation of weathers
and seasons
a windfall composing
the floor it rots into.
136 GEORGE MORGAN

His secret lies in a return to the hidden core, the dark mysterious centre
of Earth, symbol of the hidden and neglected root of our own neglected inner
consciousness, our racial and personal memory. The seat of transmutation,
it is yet the seed of permanence and life: 'This centre holds and spreads..."

NOTES

1 Preoccupations (1980) as well as Heaney's other works mentioned are published in

London-Boston by Faber and Faber.
2 W.B. Yeats: Collected Poems, London, Macmillan, 1958, p. 210.