District and Circle by Seamus Heaney

First published: 2006

Type of work: Poetry

The Work:

Seamus Heaney’s District and Circle consists primarily of lyric verse composed in a variety of forms. Most notably, Heaney returns to and elaborates upon many themes that have remained central to his poetic vision. Some poems in this volume—including “Anahorish 1944,” “The Tollund Man In Springtime,” and “The Blackbird of Glanmore”—directly reference earlier works. Other poems in District and Circle contain more subtle resonances with earlier poems. District and Circle’s “The Harrow-Pin,” with the lines “Horses’ collars lined with sweat-veined ticking,/ Old cobwebbed reins and hames and eye-patched winkers,/ The tackle of the mighty, simple dead,” calls to mind the opening lines of “Gone” from the 1969 collection Door Into the Dark: “Green froth that lathered each end/ Of the shining bit/ Is a cobweb of grass-dust.”

In 2007, the book won the Poetry Book Society’s T. S. Eliot Prize for Poetry and the Irish Times Poetry Now Award. Reviewers and readers have hailed the book as a touchstone volume.

The book’s title words, “district” and “circle,” function both as nouns and verbs. On the one hand, a district can refer to a particular place or area, a space with clear parameters or unique jurisdictions. A circle is a distinctive shape as well as a group of acquaintances or intimates (for example, a family circle or a circle of friends). Read another way, the terms also convey a sense of action. “District” describes the act of dividing or organizing an area or space into discrete parts, while “circle” evokes a move to return, encompass, surround, or gather around. Taken as verbs, “district” and “circle” are expressed in the present tense, conveying the idea that these acts occur perpetually, without ceasing. “District” and “circle” also refer to lines on the Tube, London’s subway. Significantly, the title poem takes place in London, and others, such as “To George Sefaris in the Underworld” and “Out of This World,” allude to nether realms for which the Tube stations and subway platforms serve merely as earthly imitations.

Parsing the title yields some insight into Heaney’s organization of the volume as a whole and illuminates some of the paradoxes he often describes or suggests in most of the poems, many of which center on a specific memory or the act of remembering. Another device Heaney uses is the juxtaposition of old, sometimes ancient, objects (including words and poems themselves) with contemporary things, people, and events. The book begins with several poems that contemplate implements (a turnip snedder, a sledgehammer, a trowel) and vocations (butchering, masonry) that are rare today. Heaney suggests that a powerful connection exists between these tools and those who use them, reminding readers that such gear is itself the result of craft and handiwork. He makes this point clear in “Poet to Blacksmith,” a translation of an Irish verse in which a poet instructs a blacksmith to fashion a turf-cutter that is “[t]astily finished and trim and right for the hand.” As a result, technology and practiced skill inherently affirm ingenuity and creativity, both of which also serve as equipment for the poet.

Heaney ironically elaborates on the connections between craft, muscle-memory, and poetic work as the volume progresses. In “Anahorish 1944,” for example, the poet describes Irish hog butchers and children watching U.S. soldiers marching on the roads of Northern Ireland en route to their Normandy deployment during World War II. The sight of them with their mass-produced gear, “guns on their shoulders” and accompanied by “[a]rmoured cars and tanks and open jeers,” provides a curious if not jarring contrast to the slaughterhouse awash in “sunlight and gutter-blood” and men in “gloves and aprons coming down the hill.” Heaney juxtaposes the quotidian barbarity of skilled meat cutters coming upon the orderly display of armed soldiers advancing to what will be one of the bloodiest, most chaotic, and decisive events of World War II.

In other poems, Heaney further explores the ambivalent powers of technology both to preserve and destroy, a theme associated with the poet since the publication of “Digging” in the 1966 volume Death of a Naturalist. In that famous early poem, Heaney first compares the pen in his hand to a gun and then resolves by poem’s end to use the pen as a spade to dig through experience, memory, and language to craft his art. In District and Circle’s “Helmet,” the poet marvels at the functional details fashioned onto an Irish American firefighter’s headgear. The inspired yet practical design of the individual helmet ultimately serves as a synecdochic emblem of the firefighter’s heroism, which the poet imagines as a defiant Anglo-Saxon shield-wall attempting to quell all-consuming flames.

“Anything Can Happen,” a version of a Horatian ode, provides one of the most dramatic instances of Heaney’s reimaginings. Ostensibly Horace’s description of the capricious powers of Jupiter, Heaney’s variation mentions how the Roman god’s uncontrollable lightning is so powerful that it can clog “the Atlantic shore itself,” overturn “the tallest towers,” and daunt “those in high places.” Though not explicitly, Heaney’s language evokes the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Horace’s original ode, then, serves as the tool or technology Heaney uses to reveal a conceptual parallel that resonates beyond both poets’ respective time and place. Also, like the turnip-snedder introduced in the volume’s opening pages, or like the firefighter’s helmet, a reader can conceive of Horace’s poem as an artifact, something Heaney has found, which awakens memories of shared human experience transcending the particulars of an individual’s existence.

Heaney further explores this empathetic imagination in several of the elegiac works in District and Circle. In “Stern” and “Out of This World,” respectively, Heaney recalls moments shared in life with the poets Ted Hughes and Czesław Miłosz that have become transformative utterances over time. Likewise, in the short sequence “Home Fires,” Heaney offers readers imaginary recollections of Dorothy Wordsworth and W. H. Auden as informal tributes to people he did not personally know but whose lives nonetheless remain exemplary.

Several critics have commented that in District and Circle, Heaney introduces a tone of concern in his career-long celebration of the natural world’s resilience and the ineffability, or indescribability, of its cycles. Even though readers can discern Heaney’s worry, poems appearing later in its pages sound this note most definitively. Beginning with “In Iowa,” in which a speaker conceives with terrifying clarity a prophecy of “[n]ot parted but . . . of rising waters,” through the poem “Moyulla,” which describes a river degraded by industrial exploitation, Heaney most directly explores green, or ecological, themes in these poems.

Ultimately, District and Circle asserts Heaney’s characteristically confident resolve. “Planting the Alder” concludes with a mantralike imperative that reaffirms the curative powers of nature: “Plant it, plant it,/ Steel-head in the rain.” For Heaney, this affirmation closely corresponds to a sense of belonging, and the last few poems in the volume expand on this notion by collectively gravitating toward references to home and returning to familiar environments.

“The Blackbird of Glanmore” closes the volume. This poem brilliantly redresses many of the devices and themes Heaney presents in District and Circle by revisiting yet another early work, “Mid-Term Break,” in which Heaney recollects the funeral of his brother who died in youth. Here, Heaney associates the long-deceased boy with a blackbird who resides on the grounds of the poet’s cottage in Glanmore. Heaney’s identification with the blackbird as the genius of his home is so complete that the poet achieves “a bird’s eye view” of himself as a “shadow on raked gravel/ In front of my house of life.” The low-roofed house of death evoked earlier in the poem is transformed by the blackbird’s lively activity, quickening the poet’s memories and in so doing invigorating confidence in his own creativity.

Bibliography

Bloom, Harold, ed. Seamus Heaney. Philadelphia: Chelsea House, 2002. An introductory analysis containing a biography, extracts from critical essays, thematic and structural analyses of Heaney’s work, and an index of themes and ideas.

Crowder, Ashby Bland, and Jason David Hall, eds. Seamus Heaney: Poet, Critic, Translator. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. The contents in this collection broadly survey Heaney’s works. Includes essays on Heaney’s reading, his use of allusions, and his interests in non-English-language poetry.

Desmond, John F. Gravity and Grace: Seamus Heaney and the Force of Light. Studies in Christianity and Literature 2. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2009. Though he does not directly address District and Circle, Desmond offers a compelling reading of a transcendent religious vision evident in Heaney’s poetry.

Garratt, Robert, ed. Critical Essays on Seamus Heaney. New York: G. K. Hall, 1995. A collection of essays analyzing Heaney’s poetry and the feminine principle in his work, and comparing his poetry to the poetry of Dante, William Butler Yeats, William Wordsworth, and James Joyce.

Heaney, Seamus. Stepping Stones: Interviews with Seamus Heaney. Edited by Dennis O’Driscoll. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008. Heaney articulates his views on art, politics, religion, and many other themes relevant to his life and works. Chapter 13,“’So Deeper into It,” specifically addresses District and Circle.

Jones, Chris. “Old English Escape Routes: Seamus Heaney, the Caedmon of the North.” In Strange Likeness: The Use of Old English in Twentieth Century Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. Examines how and why Heaney uses Old English language in his poetry.

Maloney, Karen Marguerite. Seamus Heaney and the Emblems of Hope. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2007. The author concentrates on Heaney’s use of Irish and other mythologies in his work, as well as his abiding interest in European prehistory and archaeology. Poetry predating District and Circle receives primary coverage.

O’Donoghue, Bernard, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. This volume collects high-quality essays assessing Heaney’s entire career. Topics include Heaney’s popular reception and his responses to feminism.

Zamorano Llena, Carmen. “Postnationalist Identity and Sites of Memory in the Latest Work of Seamus Heaney, Derek Mahon, and Paul Durcan.” Études Irlandaises 32, no. 2 (Autumn, 2007): 155-171. This essay compares Heaney’s treatment of identity and memory in District and Circle with the works of two notable contemporaries. The author focuses on Heaney’s evolving view of Ireland and his response to globalization.