A Good Anchor: Home and Education, 1939–61

Abstract

Whatever poetic success I’ve had has come from staying within the realm of my own imaginative country and my own voice.²

Seamus Justin Heaney was born on 13 April 1939, at Mossbawn, near Castledawson, County Derry. His father, Patrick, born at the end of the first decade of this century, was a cattle dealer, owning a forty-acre farm, an average size holding by Northern Irish standards. A yeoman farmer, who served as a member of the rural council, Patrick Heaney embodied solidity. The portrait in ‘Ancestral Photographs’ suggests a stocky, resolute individual, a skilled, successful bargainer, but also a figure from a lost world. With the passing of the cattle-fairs, something had been broken in him; parked behind the door, his ashplant, — a symbol of his ‘office’, — seemed like an abandoned wand.³ Already in the earliest work of the young poet, his father had become an elegiac presence, a focus for his own mourning of change. As a child, Heaney had looked up to him as the possessor of a magical strength and skill; in ‘Digging’, at one point, he appears like some ancient hero, burying ‘the bright edge deep’; presented first as the Titan Atlas in ‘Follower’, he is later praised as the complete master of his craft.

Is maith an t’ancoire an t-iarta.

The hearth is a good anchor.

(Gaelic Proverb)¹