On Seamus Heaney's "Act of Union"

Act of Union

I

Tonight, a first movement, a pulse,
As if the rain in bogland gathered head
To slip and flood: a bog-burst,
A gash breaking open the ferny bed.
Your back is a firm line of eastern coast
And arms and legs are thrown
Beyond your gradual hills. I caress
The heaving province where our past has grown.
I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder
That you would neither cajole nor ignore.
Conquest is a lie. I grow older
Conceding your half-independent shore
Within whose borders now my legacy
Culminates inexorably.

II

And I am still imperially
Male, leaving you with the pain,
The rending process in the colony,
The battering ram, the boom burst from within.
The act sprouted an obstinate fifth column
Whose stance is growing unilateral.
His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum
Mustering force. His parasitical
And ignorant little fists already
Beat at your borders and I know they're cocked
At me across the water. No treaty
I foresee will salve completely your tracked
And stretchmarked body, the big pain
That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again.

--- Seamus Heaney, from North (1975)

I don't quite know what to make of this poem, particularly in terms of its tone. The allegorical connections are clear enough, but there's more than a hint of satire in the poem-- and not against the English imperial figure, but against the notion of such awkward allegorical suggestions: the use of some phrases and words ('battering ram,' 'the heaving province,' and 'sprouted' stick out particularly) seems to be just over top enough to be comical. My thinking here is that if the poem is trying to be satirical, or at least tongue-in-cheek by nature, the poem works wonderfully, and the awkward metrics of the two sonnets become playful and clever. If, however, the poem is earnest in its allegorization, then the poem seems rather clumsy, ham-handedly reinforcing the analogies to the point of cliche. Whether it's just me or not, I don't want to read this poem too seriously: the contrivances seem too forced for Heaney's normally deft manner. There must be a larger mockery going on, and I suspect it's against the almost ritualistic tendency to define imperial powers as intrinsically male and colonized states as female, against the tendency to rely on such simplistic metaphors, like the common feminist trope of associating the sexual act, or the act of union, with violence and colonization. In many ways, it seems Heaney is trying to use every trick in the innuendo bag: 'head,' 'a bog-burst,' 'legacy,' 'fifth column,' 'cocked.' They creep into the poem with a kind of cheeky inevitability--not to mention rapid succession-- that makes the idea of reading the poem with any kind of sincerity pretty much impossible.

I don't know for sure, but this is one of the rare times I think knowing a poet's intentions would help to contextualize the poem. If the poem is indeed a sincere allegorization, it has its virtues, but it falls victim to its own desire to maintain the correlatives. If the poem is a satire, as I read it, it's very clever satire indeed, feeding the ideological associations of those it mocks while doing its business on those targets without their knowing it. If the former, the poem is all too obvious; if the latter, the poem is quite wry, and does a nice job not just on the idea of victimization and colonization, but also on the desire to make overly reductive historical and ideological comparisons (and to revel in the language that is used in making such comparisons). I could consult some of the criticism I have of Heaney, but I think I'd rather not. I think I'd rather hold to my own interpretation at this point, if only to hold fast to my considerable admiration for Heaney as a poet, even if my own experiences with reading Heaney suggests that I'm probably not too far off in my estimation of the poems satirical manoeuverings.

And, yes, it *was* about time I got back to writing about real literature on this blog. ;-)