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How do two writers studied on the module face the dilemmas of the present
through the prism of the past?

Ireland’s rich and complex history makes it almost impossible for Irish writers not to

create fiction that in some way draws up the past into the present. Seamus Heaney,

spiritual successor to W.B. Yeats once wrote: ‘In Ireland in this century [poetry] has

involved for Yeats and many others an attempt to define and interpret the present by

bringing it into significant relationship with the past, and I believe that effort in our

present circumstances has to be urgently renewed’.1 This quote is taken from a lecture

given in 1974, but is still pertinent today. Throughout his poetry, Heaney drew on

personal, national, and cultural history to investigate the state of things present, and

this essay will be looking at two of his poems, ‘Digging’ and ‘Bogland’, to explore this

notion. I will also be comparing his work with Marina Carr’s play By the Bog of Cats

(1998), to map how the past continues to be used as a tool for understanding

contemporary issues.

‘Digging’, the opening poem in Heaney’s first published volume Death of a Naturalist

(1966) is arguably his best known; it is widely studied in schools and there is a wealth of

criticism written on it. For this reason, the analysis of ‘Digging’ will be a little less

comprehensive than the two texts that follow, but its inclusion in this essay is important

in providing context for what drives Heaney as a poet. The poem serves as part-

autobiography, part-personal poetic manifesto, exploring the poet’s heritage and what

motivates him to write. Heaney sets up a dialogue with his forebears, writing through a

patrilineal past to explore ideas of heritage and inheritance, what came before and what

will continue, exposing lines of tension between tradition and modernity. Despite this

tension, the past is not criticised; Heaney is not trying to do away with his heritage but

recognise it, acknowledge it, and thusly try to figure out what comes next. This

recognition is reflected in the special attention he pays to the skills of his father and

1
Seamus Heaney, Preoccupations: Selected Prose. 1968-1978 (London: Faber and
Faber, 1980), p.60.

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grandfather, their ‘nicking and slicing’ the turfs of sod, with the ‘curt cuts of an edge’ of

the spade, indicating his respect towards this labour-intensive work.2

The poem’s chronology begins with his father in the present day, hearing outside his

window ‘a clean rasping sound/When the spade sinks into gravelly ground’, then moves

back twenty years in time to his father ‘Stooping in rhythm through potato drills/Where

he was digging’.3 Already the poem has begun with a jump back in time, from father to

son, but this continues: ‘By God, the old man could handle a spade./Just like his old

man’, creating links further still through the act of digging, outlining the sense of

patrilineal tradition.4 Dianne Meredith notes how ‘digging back into origins both uncovers

and creates a sense of place’, and this act of digging has two different outcomes: his

grandfather digging up turf for fuel, an act of uncovering, connoting a revelation of

things past, and his father growing potatoes, looking forward to the future.5 The act of

digging is revealed as abundant in meaning and signification, set forth as both an

intrinsic part of traditional Irish livelihood and as an emblem of Irish history. It also

speaks to the importance of place in both Heaney’s writing and Irish writing in general,

the Irish land a oft-seen backdrop.

Heaney wrote ‘Digging’ in-between the end of the IRA’s “Operation Harvest”, a guerrilla

warfare campaign on the Northern Irish border, and the beginning of the 1969 IRA

campaign which would end with 1994’s Good Friday agreement. Adrian Frazier notes

that the poem speaks to the rift between ‘an older generation of Irish Catholics that were

attractive in their immemorial rural customs’ and ‘a younger one adrift in urban

modernism, nostalgic for a pre-capitalist sense of community, many of them determined

to bring about political change by persuasion or by force’.6 This idea of “persuasion or

2
Seamus Heaney, 100 Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2000), p.3; p.4.
3
Ibid., p.3.
4
Ibid.
5
Dianne Meredith, ‘Landscape or mindscape? Seamus Heaney's bogs’, Irish
Geography, 32:2 (1999), 126-134 (p.130).
6
Adrian Frazier, ‘Anger and Nostalgia: Seamus Heaney and the Ghost of the Father’,
Irish-American Cultural Institute, 36:3-4 (2001),7-38 (p.24).

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force” can be interpreted, respectively, as writing or fighting, thus making Heaney’s

conflict three-fold: does he follow in his father and grandfather’s footsteps, does he join

the IRA’s cause, or does he assert himself and his values through writing? The poem

begins with the ‘squat pen’ resting ‘snug as a gun’ in his hand, flirting with the option of

violence, of force.7 Yet this is the only hint of violence in the poem; by the end he admits

that though he has ‘no spade to follow men like [his father and grandfather]’, he’ll take

his pen and ‘dig with it’.8 He negotiates the past and the present, honouring the past but

moving forward; in choosing writing, he chooses peace.

Here Heaney begins to reveal the influence that the Irish landscape has on its people

and their relationship to the land. In the poem ‘Bogland’, the final poem in his second

anthology Door into the Dark (1969), the land becomes a character itself. The tone here

is darker, and it draws from a broader Irish history over the personal. Declan Kiberd

claims that ‘the Irish are possessed by place’, a natural preoccupation for a country

needing to negotiate national identity after both colonial and civil war. 9 This concern with

space and place generates meaning and symbolism even in localised spaces. Maureen

O’Connor and Benjamin Gearey note how the Irish peat bogs therefore signify ‘[the]

historical treatment of peat as both an economic resource to be exploited for fuel and a

cultural reservoir of “authentic” Irish identity’; in Ireland place is never just place, and

the bog is never just the bog.10

‘Bogland’ found its genesis whilst Heaney was teaching literature at Queen’s University,

Belfast, writing that he ‘had been reading about the frontier and the west as an

important myth in the American consciousness’ and resolved to write about ‘the bog as

an answering Irish myth’.11 The poem opens ‘We have no prairies’, invoking the verdant

7
Heaney, 100 Poems, p.3.
8
Ibid., p.4.
9
Declan Kiberd, ‘Deanglicization’, in Inventing Ireland (London: Vintage, 1996), p.49.
10
Maureen O’Connor and Benjamin Gearey ‘“Black butter melting and opening
underfoot”: the “peat harvest” in Irish literature and culture’, Green Letters, 24:4
(2020), 381-390 (p.382).
11
Heaney, Preoccupations, p.55.

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open spaces that are immediately evoked by the frontier myth.12 The poem juxtaposes

this sense of freedom by painting a picture in which ‘Everywhere the eye concedes

to/Encroaching horizon’, establishing an oppressive, suffocating atmosphere.13 America

and its myths are defined by expansion and conquest, invading new lands. Here, Heaney

defines Ireland through its contrast to this notion, representing a country that doesn’t

conquer, but has been conquered; America had its gold rush, but ‘They'll never dig coal

here’, in Ireland.14

Yet this is not a criticism of Ireland, or a means to belittle it. Heaney valorises his

country by giving it a depthiness that colonial forces are lacking, claiming ‘Our pioneers

keep striking/Inwards and downwards’; instead of finding national identity externally,

Ireland and its people look within their cultural heritage to uncover meanings either

forgotten in time or oppressed by external forces.15 When a Great Irish Elk is pulled from

the peat, it is reduced to ‘An astounding crate full of air’, evincing the feeling that once

artefact is removed from its context, its country, it is stripped of meaning. The previous

stanza includes the line ‘Our unfenced country/Is bog [my emphasis]’; the link between

bog and country is not left up to interpretation but is immediately established as a

symbol of Ireland itself, emphasizing the importance of the bog in Irish cultural

identity.16

This works on two levels: symbolically positioning the bog as an avatar for the Irish

landscape and also underscoring the symbolism within the bog itself. So ‘Bogland’ at

once puts forth an identity and a metaphor for the preservation of that identity. Heaney

writes that before he wrote this poem, he had ‘began to get an idea of bog as the

memory of the landscape, or as a landscape that remembered everything that had

12
Heaney, 100 Poems, p.20.
13
Ibid.
14
Ibid.
15
Ibid.
16
Ibid.

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happened in and to it’.17 Heaney is concerned with the preservation of identity, and how

the act of remembrance is intrinsic to its success; in his bog we find the Great Irish Elk,

‘Butter sunk under/More than a hundred years’, and ‘the waterlogged trunks/Of great

firs’.18 What makes the bog such a fitting symbol for memory and the way that histories

build up on top of each other is how it is formed from ‘dead but not yet decomposed

layers’.19 So the bogs are formed by the act of preservation itself, what goes in will come

out in just the state that it entered in. Heaney’s poem interprets the layers of the bog as

something that ‘keeps crusting/Between the sights of the sun’; the sun, with its

connotations of hope and brightness, signals to the need for visibility in Irish history. 20

Another link to Irish cultural heritage is the link Heaney makes between bog bodies and

Kathleen Ni Houlihan/ the poor old woman, the symbol of Mother Ireland who he defines

as ‘an indigenous territorial numen, a tutelar of the whole island’. 21 William Pratt notes

that through allusions to this figure, who called on Irish men to die in her name, in

‘Bogland’, Heaney ‘drew a strong moral parallel between contemporary terrorism and

ancient ritual sacrifice’, using the ancient past to highlight problems in the present. 22

This began after reading Peter Glob’s The Bog People (1965), the English translation of

which, Heaney notes, was published ‘appositely, the year the killing started, in 1969’. 23

Heaney began to draw parallels between the bog bodies, killed in human sacrifice over

two millennia ago, and the young men in Ireland sacrificing themselves for their country.

Heaney himself argues that the metaphor of the poor old woman is ‘not remote from the

bankrupt psychology and mythologies implicit in the terms Irish Catholic and Ulster

Protestant’; the poem calls back to the myth of the Shan Van Vocht, then further back to

the ‘ritual sacrifices to the Mother Goddess, the goddess of the ground’, and finally

17
Heaney, Preoccupations, p.54.
18
Heaney, 100 Poems, p.20.
19
Dianne Meredith, ‘Hazards in the Bog—Real and Imagined’, Geographical Review, 92:3
(2002), 319-332.
20
Heaney, 100 Poems, p.20.
21
Heaney, Preoccupations, p.57.
22
William Pratt, ‘The Great Irish Elk: Seamus Heaney’s Personal Helicon’, World
Literature Today, 70:2, (1996), 261–66 (p.264).
23
Heaney, Preoccupations, p.57.

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brings them both to the present in alluding to the ‘Irish political martyrdom’ of the

Troubles.24

Further allusion to military action can be found in the line ‘Every layer they strip/Seems

camped on before’, evoking images of military camps, the seemingly eternal occupation

of an invading force, Britain, whose presence in Ireland continued for almost an entire

millennium.25 The spectre of British colonialism still hangs over Ireland and Heaney

seems to suggest that this will last, it is a part of Irish history, just like the artefacts

preserved in its bogs. Like ‘Digging’, ‘Bogland’ investigates the navigation between past

and present, a painful history and an uncertain future. Through the setting of the bog,

Heaney asserts the need to honour the past while still holding hope for the future.

Though entirely distinct in form and style, Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats shares a

great deal with Heaney’s poetry. Like the wasteland-esque imagery of Heaney’s

‘Bogland’, Carr’s play is just as barren: ‘A bleak white landscape of ice and snow’, a

blank slate ready to have meaning imposed upon it.26 Carr, like Heaney, looks at Irish

heritage through its symbols and myths – including, of course, the bog - though where

Heaney writes back through his fathers, Carr writes through mothers; there is a strong

matrilineal line running through her play.

Author and classicist Daniel Mendelsohn remarks that ‘because human nature doesn’t

change, all literature is always true; doesn’t matter how old it is’, an idea that rings

especially true of By the Bog of Cats, a play which brings the past into the present

through myths and cycles.27 The oldest and most significant myth that is woven into By

the Bog is Euripides’ Medea, the pre-eminent tale of the lengths a woman scorned will go

24
Ibid.
25
Heaney, 100 Poems, p.21.
26
Marina Carr, By the Bog of Cats, in Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama, ed. by J.P.
Harrington (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), p.353.
27
Twenty Summers, Michael Cunningham and Daniel Mendelsohn in Conversation, online
video recording, YouTube, 18 Oct 2018 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?
v=T6SURouPAXI&list=WL&index=1&t=1127s> [accessed 7 May 2023]

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for revenge, the measures she will take to try to make herself understood. Hester Swane

takes the role of Medea, whose husband Carthage Kilbride (Jason) has left her for a

younger woman, Caroline (Glauce), the daughter of a rich wealthy man, Xavier Cassidy

(Creon). Jeremiah Curtin, an American folklorist, typified mythology through the

‘codification of the errors of primitive men, out of which […] curious and interesting

conclusions are to be drawn’; by employing an Ancient Greek myth, Carr creates a

continuum between past and present, revealing how the problems faced in By the Bog of

Cats, in its contemporary setting, find their own echoes throughout history. 28

Marianne McDonald writes that in Medea ‘the sons are in the image and likeness of their

father […] One wonders if Medea would have killed daughters’.29 She finds her answer in

By the Bog, where Hester’s most complicated and frustrated feelings aren’t for Carthage,

but for her own mother, Big Josie Swane, who abandoned her on the Bog of Cats at aged

seven, the age that her daughter, also named Josie, is in the events of the play. These

similarities in age and name are just one aspect of the matrilineal cycles that Carr

presents in the play. It begins with the Ghost Fancier, Carr’s version of the Grim Reaper,

coming to visit Hester, unsure whether its sunrise or sunset, to which she replies: ‘It’s

that hour when it could be aither dawn or dusk’.30 This temporal uncertainty foregrounds

the cyclical nature of the play and of mythology in general, while also establishing

Hester’s diachronic experience of time, where she is nominally in the present, but

mentally living in the past. Furthermore, the Catwoman claims that Hester’s mother

claimed she ‘will live as long as this black swan, not a day more, not a day less’, and

after we first meet Hester dragging this swan, dead, her neighbour Monica says that

‘she’d good innin’s, way past the life span of swans’, suggesting that Hester is already on

borrowed time, foreshadowing her own death at the end of the play. 31

28
Jeremiah Curtin, Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co.,
1890), p.17.
29
Marianne McDonald, ‘The Irish and Greek Tragedy’, in Amid Our Troubles: Irish
Versions of Greek Tragedy, ed. by Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton, (United
Kingdom: Bloomsbury Academic, 2002), p.62.
30
Carr, By the Bog, p.353.
31
Carr, By the Bog, p.359; p.354.

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It is through maternal ties that we glean information about the characters’ backstories;

Big Josie Swane is not the only mother figure in the play. The Catwoman says to Hester

‘I knew your mother, I helped her bring ya into the world’, creating a motherly bond

between the two.32 Similarly, Hester tells Caroline how she used to babysit her after

mother died, after which she still retains the vestiges of her own motherly feelings

towards Caroline, feeling that ‘there’s two Hester Swanes, one that is decent and very

fond of ya […] And the other Hester, well, she could slide a knife down your face’. 33

These complex feelings speak to the very thing that makes Medea so compelling even

two thousand years after it was written, the fact that Medea breaks the ultimate taboo: a

woman committing infanticide. Or, to put it in a modern context, being a bad mother.

Carr herself says that part of what she wants to explore in her work is the complex

nature of motherhood in a patriarchal society, she states: ‘I don’t think the world should

assume that we are all natural mothers. And it does’.34 Hester, Josie, Monica, and the

Catwoman all appear to feel, at times, hesitance and reluctance about this expectation

to be a natural mother. Clearly the men do not.

Ultimately, it is Hester’s connection to her mother that forms the fateful cycle which she

is both unaware and aware of. At forty years old she is still waiting for her mother,

claiming ‘I watched her walk away from me across the Bog of Cats. And across the Bog

of Cats I’ll watch her return’.35 But in the play’s final scene, she realises the truth and

kills Josie and then herself, thus symbolically killing her mother and breaking the cycle,

as she tells her daughter, ‘I won’t have ya as I was, waitin’ for a lifetime for somewan to

return, because they don’t, Josie, they don’t’.36 Medea commits infanticide because she

sees it as the worst possible way to get revenge on Jason; Hester kills her daughter in

32
Ibid., p.357.
33
Ibid., p.364.
34
Marina Carr in Heidi Stephenson and Natasha Langridge, Rage and Reason: Women
Playwrights on Playwriting (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 1997), p.150
35
Carr, By the Bog, p.371.
36
Carr, By the Bog, p.395.

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an unthinkable act of desperate maternal love, wanting to spare her of her fate of living

without a mother. Furthermore, by creating a link between Big Josie Swane and ‘Mother

Ireland, Kathleen Ni Houlihan, the poor old woman, the Shan Van Vocht, whatever’, Carr

de-romanticises, deconstructs, and de-fetishizes this mythic figure in Irish lore.37 Unlike

Cathleen Ni Houlihan, with ‘the walk of a queen’, Big Josie Swane is remembered with

‘the brazen walk of her, and not a thank you or a flicker of guilt in her eye and her

reekin’ of drink’.38 Instead she reflects ‘how often the Irish solution is a living suicide in

drink, or other forms of self-destruction’, a damning, but perhaps more realistic,

depiction of the Ireland of today.39

Hester, like her mother, like the Catwoman, recalls pre-Christian Ireland, with her ability

to see ghosts, with the Catwoman claiming ‘You’re my match in witchery, Hester, same

as your mother was’.40 She is shunned in the community for being a witch and for her

tinker heritage, confining her to the peripheries of society, contrasted with Carthage,

whose last name “Kilbride” etymologically derived from St Bridid of Kildare, mother saint

of Ireland, connoting his legitimacy and status as a more welcome inhabitant of the bog.

Derek Galdwin contends that ‘in their parallel to a complicated and traumatic national

history, Hester and the bog have been equally dispossessed and pushed to the periphery

where they come to signify in supernatural ways’.41 Yet it is her pagan magical quality, in

part, which ties Hester to the bog, which O’Connor and Gearey see as being ‘out of sync

with human temporality, as wasteland, haunted, and supernatural, […] essentially ‘other’

to the human, uninhabitable, unwelcoming and uncanny’, all qualities that could just as

well be applied to Hester.42 Here Carr represents a Heaney-esque value in connection

with the land, that although Hester is shunned and spurned, it is part of her power that

37
Heaney, Preoccupations, p.57.
38
Lady Gregory, Cathleen Ni Houlihan, in Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama, J.P.
Harrington (ed. by) (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009), p.353; Carr, By the Bog, p.370.
39
McDonald, ‘The Irish and Greek Tragedy’, p.62.
40
Carr, By the Bog, p.357.
41
Derek Galdwin, ‘Staging the trauma of the bog in Marina Carr's By the Bog of
Cats’, Irish Studies Review, 19:4 (2011), 387-400 (p.388).
42
O’Connor and Gearey, ‘Black butter’, p.388.

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she is so in tune with the land she has lived on her whole life. Thus Carr’s mythic

timeline in the play recalls Heaney’s own in ‘Bogland’ from ancient times to the poor old

woman to the present, in her own way using the past to make sense of contemporary

issues.

Ireland is an innately haunted country; after being colonised for so long, with Irish

culture, language, history all side-lined, if not outright interdicted, there is a wealth of

cultural history for Irish writers to bring back into the light. Jacques Derrida, once the

foremost scholar on all things ghostly, contended that ‘they are always there, specters,

even if they do not exist, even if they are no longer, even if they are not yet’, a useful

idea for understanding the presence of the past in Irish literature, how the spectres of

history will always be present no matter how recognisable might be. 43 I have chosen

three texts which actively investigate Ireland’s past, yet with this Derrida quote in mind,

for an Irish writer writing about Ireland, it is almost impossible to avoid the past in

writing about the present.

43
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2006), p.221.

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Bibliography:

Bourke, Bernadette, ‘Grotesque and Carnivalesque Elements in By the Bog of Cats’,

in Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama, ed. by J.P. Harrington (New York: W.W.

Norton, 2009).

Carr, Marina, By the Bog of Cats, in Modern and Contemporary Irish Drama, ed. by

J.P. Harrington (New York: W.W. Norton, 2009).

--- in Heidi Stephenson and Natasha Langridge, Rage and Reason: Women

Playwrights on Playwriting (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 1997).

Curtin, Jeremiah, Myths and Folk-Lore of Ireland (Boston: Little, Brown, and Co.,

1890).

Derrida, Jacques, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and

the New International (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2006).

Foster, John Wilson, Colonial Consequences: Essays in Irish Literature and Culture

(Dublin: Liliput Press, 1991).

Foster, Verna A. ‘Mother Medea and Her Children: Maternal Ambivalence in the

Medean Plays of Marina Carr, Cherríe Moraga, and Rachel Cusk’, Comparative

Drama, 55:1 (2021), 83-111.

Frazier, Adrian, ‘Anger and Nostalgia: Seamus Heaney and the Ghost of the Father’,

Irish-American Cultural Institute, 36:3-4, (2001), 7-38.

Galdwin, Derek, ‘Staging the trauma of the bog in Marina Carr's By the Bog of

Cats’, Irish Studies Review, 19:4 (2011), 387-400.

Heaney, Seamus, 100 Poems (London: Faber and Faber, 2000).

--- Preoccupations: Selected Prose. 1968-1978 (London: Faber and Faber, 1980).

--- ‘Kinship’, in James Joyce Quarterly, 11:3, 1974, (227–37).

Kiberd, Declan. “Deanglicization” in Inventing Ireland. London: Vintage, 1996. 136-

154.

McDonald, Marianne, ‘The Irish and Greek Tragedy’, in Amid Our Troubles: Irish

Versions of Greek Tragedy, ed. by Marianne McDonald and J. Michael Walton (United

Kingdom: Bloomsbury Academic, 2002). 

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Meredith, Dianne, ‘Hazards in the Bog—Real and Imagined’, Geographical Review,

92:3 (2002), 319-332.

--- ‘Landscape or mindscape? Seamus Heaney's bogs’. Irish Geography, 32:2 (1999),

126-134.

O’Connor, Maureen and Gearey, Benjamin, ‘“Black butter melting and opening

underfoot”: the “peat harvest” in Irish literature and culture’, Green Letters, 24:4

(2020), 381-390.

O’Donoghue, Bernard. “Heaney’s Classics and the Bucolic.” Chapter. In The

Cambridge Companion to Seamus Heaney, edited by Bernard O'Donoghue, 106–21.

Cambridge Companions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008

Pratt, William, ‘The Great Irish Elk: Seamus Heaney’s Personal Helicon’, World

Literature Today, 70:2, (1996), 261–66.

Sihra, Melissa. “A Cautionary Tale: Marina Carr’s By the Bog of Cats” in Theatre

Stuff: Critical Essays on Contemporary Irish Theatre. Dublin: Carysfort, 2000. 257-

268.

Yeats, W.B., Selected Poems (London: Alma Books, 2015).

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