Station Island by Seamus Heaney

First published: 1984, in Station Island

Type of poem: Meditation

The Poem

“Station Island” is a long meditation on Seamus Heaney’s own poetry. The poem sets forth a series of encounters with “ghosts” or remembered figures, many of them from Heaney’s own life, some from his reading. The poem takes its title and major setting from Station Island in County Donegal, a devotional shrine; the “stations” there are fixed locations of prayer. The poem is, briefly, a parallel to Dante’s Purgatorio (c. 1320).

The “I” of the poem is Heaney himself. A few of the ghosts are identified by the text or by Heaney’s notes. What is more important is what they say to the poet—the advice and counsel they give him about how to write and how not to “break covenants and fail obligations” to himself, to his art, and to his culture.

Part 1 seems to take place largely in memory. The boy Heaney, on his way to church, encounters an old man, breaking the Sabbath by collecting wood. It is Simon Sweeney, head of a family of tinkers who camped near Heaney’s boyhood home. Heaney, hearing bell-notes which are both part of the remembered Sunday and part of the procession on Station Island, sees “a crowd of shawled women,” who may very well be his fellow pilgrims. Like the poem itself, the crowd grows into a larger crowd of “half-remembered faces.” Heaney sets out “to face into my station.” Sweeney, however, is not done with him yet: “Stay clear of all processions” is his shouted advice—processions of religion, politics, and literary and cultural conformity.

Part 2 seems to occur on shore, before Heaney has taken the ferry ride to the island. Seated in his car, he is approached by an angry ghost, who proves to be the nineteenth century Irish novelist and folklorist William Carleton. Carleton was Catholic by birth but converted to the (Protestant) Church of Ireland. Much of his writing records the life of rural peasantry and the sectarian hostilities evident in it even more than a century ago. He is connected to Station Island by way of his first published work, “The Loch Derg Pilgrim,” which describes his own visit to the shrine.

Heaney admits that he has read the “Pilgrim.” Carleton, perhaps somehow having read Heaney’s own accounts of the current sectarian violence in Ulster, is struck by the long persistence of such violence.

Heaney tries to reject the model of Carleton and goes on to suggest how closely his own Derry upbringing imitates the peasant life observed and described by Carleton. It is another example of persistence, yet seemingly a less threatening one than the persistence of the Ribbonmen (Catholic nationalists) and “Orange bigots” (Protestants claiming a loyalty to England) whom Carleton notices. Carleton begins to show some of the self-doubt that will shortly overcome Heaney as well, condemning his conversion as the act of a “turncoat.” He has been a man who followed Sweeney’s advice and refused to follow the expected processions. A part of what Carleton goes on to advise—“Remember everything and keep your head”—is advice that Heaney seems long before to have followed. Maybe he acknowledges this in his enigmatic last message, a strange and not very pleasant metaphor for an art rooted, like Heaney’s, in the details of a particular rural way of life.

Part 3 finds Heaney hearing in the devotions of the present a direct continuation of the religious devotions of his childhood. The ghost here is Heaney himself, as a child saying his prayers with the family and rather mischievously hiding in a large oak sideboard. There he finds the family’s relics of a dead aunt.

Part 4 is built around renunciation, first as part of the present pilgrimage, second in the life of a young priest who became a missionary. Heaney’s memory of the priest is ironic; he can recall how the priest became a kind of “holy mascot.” The priest, in turn, accuses Heaney of a kind of a nostalgic return to the Catholic life within which he was reared. The priest wonders if Heaney is endeavoring to take “a last look” at the sources of his own life and mind or is only returning to the devotional habits of his childhood.

Part 5 may in part be a response, since it begins with “a last look” at his schooling in Anahorish school, and especially at Barney Murphy, a master there who taught Latin to Heaney. Murphy and another unnamed schoolmaster soon give way to two of Heaney’s literary “masters,” first the Ulster novelist and short story writer Michael McLaverty, and finally the loud voice of the poet Patrick Kavanagh. Kavanagh speaks rather dismissively of Heaney’s accomplishment as a poet. Perhaps he represents that nagging voice which prompted Heaney to move from his basically lyric poems into longer ventures such as “Station Island” and Sweeney Astray (1983).

Part 6 seems to take its cue from Kavanagh’s final rude and sarcastic remark about chasing women. Again Heaney looks back, into the world of adolescent lust and at an unnamed girl whom he pursued in those days. The present world of the pilgrimage interrupts this reflection and suggests other, more “literary” lines of thought—the pastoral verse of Horace, then the love poetry of Dante.

Part 7 forcefully interrupts the mood of reverie; the ghost here is not some beautiful girl or the poet himself as a rather foolishly lovesick boy, but the victim of a sectarian killing. The poem offers a straightforward account of the murder of the ghost. In one sense, the poem is important for what it does not say. The victim, a small-town shopkeeper, was in fact the Catholic victim of a reprisal killing. The killers were off-duty Protestant policemen. The poem itself invokes no sectarian labels whatsoever; Heaney refuses to follow in that “procession” which is the self-generating cycle of sectarian victimization in his native Ulster. The encounter and the poem that records it cannot wholly escape politics or political commitments; confronted with the existence of such victims as this, Heaney feels guilt over his own, less direct part in the politics of civil rights in Northern Ireland. He asks forgiveness, but none is offered.

Part 8 finds the poet-pilgrim still on his rounds. There he encounters two ghosts from his own past, and the note of guilt deepens. The first ghost is that of one of Heaney’s friends, an archaeologist who worked near Belfast. Heaney regrets now his inability to talk satisfactorily with the man during his final stay in the hospital. Again he can find no forgiveness. A second ghost appears, that of Heaney’s cousin Colum McCartney, another victim of sectarian violence and the subject of the poem “The Strand at Lough Beg” in Field Work (1979).

McCartney, like many of the other ghosts, is angry; he does not find Heaney’s having remade his death into poetry at all a consolation, and indeed rebukes him for his commitment to poetry rather than to the sectarian struggle which cost McCartney his life. Worse still, he says, “You confused evasion with artistic tact”—once again, he did not find the correct words, as he had not with his dying archaeologist friend. The result was a “whitewash” job, prettifying the “ugliness” of the actual killing and hiding it behind “the lovely blinds of the Purgatorio.” Part 9 hears another sectarian voice, that of an Irish Republican Army (IRA) hunger striker. The ghost drives Heaney all the way to “self-disgust”—the emotional low point of the poem—and prompts another apology for lack of full commitment. Heaney goes further: “I hate where I was born.”

Yet as part 10 shows, he is not finished with his own past; more gently and lovingly, he recalls a mug used in his bathroom, once used as a prop by some traveling players near his childhood home. Part 11 again looks back, to an unnamed priest who urges Heaney to translate the Spanish mystic and poet Saint John of the Cross—perhaps as partial answer to the entrapment in the personal and cultural which Heaney seems to feel. The greater part of this section is in fact, just such a translation—of a poem explicitly about the “fountain” of faith and eternal life in God, but implicity about the fountain of poetic inspiration.

In part 12, Heaney returns to the shore, but he is not done with ghosts quite yet. A final figure appears; it is James Joyce, who rebuffs the poet’s effort to discuss his A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). Joyce offers advice which echoes Sweeney’s. Against Carleton’s insistence that Heaney attend to and remember the details of Irish life, Joyce argues for a freer path. The poem as a whole thus ends with the notes of radical self-doubt and “Irishness” as an obligation rejected unequivocally.

Forms and Devices

The poem moves through a variety of forms. There is occasional rhyme and near rhyme in the five-line stanzas of part 1 and the quatrains of part 3 and part 10; there is a careful approximation of Dante’s terza rima in the tercets of parts 2 and 12, and less elaborately in part 7. The translation from Saint John of the Cross in part 11 is in short rhymed stanzas with a refrain. Ironically, Colum McCartney rejects poetic elegance generally (part 8) in elaborately rhymed verse. Parts 5 and 6 are written in ten-or eleven-syllable free-verse lines.

The most evident and consistent device is the appearance of what Heaney calls “Presences,” which are in fact recollections and imaginations—“ghosts,” but more accurately enactments of Heaney’s own self-accusing voice.

Sources for Further Study

America. CL, June 23, 1984, p. 60.

Book World. XV, January 27, 1985, p. 1.

Collins, Floyd. Seamus Heaney: The Crisis of Identity. Newark: The University of Delaware Press, 2003. Collins puts more emphasis on the Christian aspects of Heaney’s work than other scholars, covering his early life in detail, including photographs and interviews.

Corcoran, Neil. The Poetry of Seamus Heaney: A Critical Study. London: Faber, 1998. A discriminating, knowledgeable study of Heaney’s poetry, using the poet’s literary criticism, relationship to Irish culture, and participation in contemporary social and artistic issues to inform the discussions of poetry.

Heaney, Seamus. Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968-1978. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1980. An appealing account of the poet’s preferences, influences, and intentions, gathered in a series of eloquent, revealing and incisive essays and lectures, notably one on the effect of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetry on Heaney in religious and aesthetic terms.

Library Journal. CIX, December, 1984, p. 2285.

The New Republic. CXCII, February 18, 1985, p. 37.

The New York Review of Books. XXXII, March 14, 1985, p. 19.

Time. CXXV, February 25, 1985, p. 91.

Times Literary Supplement. October 19, 1984, p. 1191.

Vendler, Helen. Seamus Heaney. New York: HarperCollins, 1998. An enlightening consideration of Heaney’s style, form, and language in terms of an argument that Heaney is primarily a lyric poet.

World Literature Today. LVII, Summer, 1983, p. 365.