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The future of a mourner: Seamus Heaney’s late work

ABSTRACT Throughout his career, Seamus Heaney’s poetry was often inspired by his memory of people and things that have passed away. In his late work, however, memory takes the form of mourning, and his memory of deceased friends and family gains poignancy as he acknowledges his own mortality. Drawing contrasts with the forms of mourning described by Sigmund Freud and Roland Barthes, this essay shows how Heaney manages to arrive at solace by imagining not only past losses but also the future lives of his children and grandchildren. His poetry holds together clashing temporalities and arrives at a resolution that is ultimately hopeful. Heaney’s late work, particularly in his final volume Human Chain, is introspective in its candid reckoning with his mortality, but it also presents his own life in a web of relations to others. Memory is full of mourning for others, and the future is similarly, but hopefully, social.