The role and significance of ancestral voices in Seamus Heaney's 'Station Island'

Abstract

This thesis focuses on one small selection from the prolific volume of Seamus Heaney's writing: part two of his three part collection of poetry entitled Station Island. This central section, also called 'Station Island', is a series of twelve poems chronicling Heaney's pilgrimage to the island of St. Patrick's Purgatory. In these poems Heaney is revisiting a pilgrimage he had last done as a Northern Irish Catholic child steeped in religious obedience and a native wisdom that favoured silence: "Smoke signals are loudmouthed compared with us" ('Whatever You Say Say Nothing' from North). As an adult and a poet, Heaney returns to Station Island and has a series of visionary meetings with people from his past. Heaney is confronted by his own ghosts. The separate voices are all ancestral, those that are linked to place, family and tribe, and those that are to do with literature. Each voice puts its own case, tells its own story, but each voice also takes part in conversation with one or more of the other voices in the sequence. They agree, disagree, make a harmonious whole or trace a fracture that may never be resolved. In effect, 'Station Island' is a microcosm of Heaney's political and literary foundations - it is North's painful, self-doubting 'Exposure' writ large. My argument in looking at these 'Station Island' poems is not that Heaney finds a way to resolve the dilemmas and demands the various voices exact from him. It's rather that in exposing the voices most personal and fundamental to himself, he is able to 'know', to understand consciously, their influence on his writing. Poetic ancestors materialise in ghostly approximations of their message, form and structure within the poems. They show their influence on Heaney's craft and technique and in 'shadowing' his work throw into sharp relief Heaney's original poetic voice.