‘Its flesh was sweet / Like thickened wine’: Iconography and Sacramentalism in the Poetry of Seamus Heaney

Abstract

The mass of critical appraisals, biographies, poet studies, interviews and volumes of collected essays examining Heaney’s poetry and poetic career make approaching his poetry, and the criticism that accompanies it, a somewhat daunting task, particularly when one does so in the hope, as in Mahon’s homage to MacNeice, of ‘keeping the colours new’ (NC 3). At first glance, writing about Catholicism in Heaney’s poetry might not seem the quickest route to staking an original claim. As discussed, Seamus Deane (1987: 175) renders Heaney ‘characteristic of his Northern Irish Catholic community’ and its spokesperson, and many of Heaney’s critics have read his work in terms of its communal identifications. Catholicism is ever present in biographical summaries of Heaney’s background and his rural upbringing in Catholic County Derry. The aim of this chapter, however, is to bring Catholicism into the foreground by considering its modes of signification in relation to Heaney’s poetic practice.