Reading Heaney on love

I'll share with you a poem. I originally encountered it in its Hungarian translation by András Imreh, three years ago. There was a huge project culminating in a volume of Heaney's poetry. A team of excellent poets-translators was working on it for years. (But for those of you who aren't very familiar with how these things go: poets, like lawyers or researchers, work on more than one project at the same time, so don't imagine these guys only working on this and doing nothing else.) You can read some of these Hungarian translations here, on the literary journal Nagyvilág's site: http://www.nagyvilag-folyoirat.hu/NV09-11-ok.pdf

Seamus Heaney - Act of Union

I

To-night, a first movement, a pulse,
As if the rain in bogland gathered head
To slip and flood: a bog-burst,
A gash breaking open the ferny bed.
Your back is a firm line of eastern coast
And arms and legs are thrown
Beyond your gradual hills. I caress
The heaving province where our past has grown.
I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder
That you would neither cajole nor ignore.
Conquest is a lie. I grow older
Conceding your half-independent shore
Within whose borders now my legacy
Culminates inexorably.

II                                                                                                           

And I am still imperially
Male, leaving you with pain,
The rending process in the colony,
The battering ram, the boom burst from within.
The act sprouted an obstinate fifth column
Whose stance is growing unilateral.
His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum
Mustering force. His parasitical
And ignorant little fists already
Beat at your borders and I know they're cocked
At me across the water. No treaty
I foresee will salve completely your tracked
And stretchmarked body, the big pain
That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again

The poem can be read in more than one way: the first interpretation suggests itself as obvious. It is a love poem about the union of a man and a woman. Union should be understood in more than one ways: the poem at the beginning depicts their sexual act, as he enters here and her body is 'breaking open.'

"Your back is a firm line of eastern coast

And arms and legs are thrown"

The woman's back is the edge of the country they form together. They extend as far her contours. And then they hug each other, ending in an embrace and the enjoyment of the woman's curvy shapes, described as 'Arms and legs are thrown beyond your gradual hills.'

"I caress

The heaving province where our past has grown"

can be read as him holding her head close, where their past has grown in her memories.

The last four lines begin by claiming that he is not young anymore. He does not want to seduce, or rule, or own the woman. They are partners. Nevertheless they are even more united, as she carries his child now.

The second verse's first four lines talk of pain and conjure battle images. This again can be understood as talking about the pain man cause woman, sometimes physically during the act of passionate sex, sometimes emotionally. But there is one more source of pain lurking in the background, which he couldn't avoid causing her, no matter what his resolution is: that she will be the one who has to give birth.

In lines five and six the theme of unification enters again. The conception of the child has happened and forms now an additional boundary between them.

Lines seven to eleven elaborate on the topic of how fathers fear that their sons will overthrow them - in whatever sense; by being better in their profession, being stronger, more clever or having a larger say in family matters. The son already conquered the mother in a way, in which the father never could. Ruling from the inside and although unconscious and not knowing, already shaking his fists at him.

The last four lines elaborate on the thought that the union of parenthood is paradoxical. It will bind them together, it will leave their relationship in place, but he will never have the same claim upon her as he did before her giving birth, as said here

"No treaty

I foresee will salve completely your tracked

And stretchmarked body"

These lines also stress the contrast between the man's forceful situation in the beginning lines, when the act of entering the woman's body is likened to him being a mighty storm dividing the earth. Whereas in the last lines, he is just a powerless bystander, neither being able to prevent the creation of his successor, nor the pain of the woman. By giving birth she becomes more independent, and it is something only she can do.

Another reading of the poem would stress that it's a play of thoughts on the love-hate, united-divided relationship of Ireland and Northern Ireland. But so much poetry is enough for today morning and I'll leave it up to the reader to look up the fascinating, elevating and sad history of Ireland.