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‘The Forewarned Journey Back’

In his poem ‘The Conway Stewart’ the parental gift of a fountain pen, on the eve of Heaney’s departure to boarding school, performs a symbolic katabasis (descent), as the nib drinks deep of the fresh black liquid in a Lethean prelude to new birth. The pen’s mystical immersion signals the moment of severance from home and family but it also anticipates a return, a reconnection. In his earlier poem ‘Digging’ the pen was to be Heaney’s spade, the instrument that would connect him to the soil of his forbears. Now the pen is transfigured, it is his golden bough, his passage to the netherworld of the past, bearing with it the power to elegize, to revivify memory. This chapter will examine Seamus Heaney’s lifelong preoccupation—culminating in his final collection Human Chain (2010) and his posthumously published translation of Aeneid VI—with the numinous essence of Home and his continual association of the act of nostos (homecoming) with that of katabasis, with crossing and rebirth. It will also consider his notion of ‘poetry as a point of entry into the buried life of the feelings or as a point of exit for it’.