s journey through the woods is one of penitence, marked by an adherence to Christian practices such as fasting on Fridays. For instance, as he encounters a woman giving birth by the church at Cloonburren, he is enraged that she is doing so on a fast day (p. 19). Repeatedly, he implores “Christ”, “God”, the “Lord” to have mercy on him: are looking for roosts in his tree. The life God grants me now is bare and strait; I am haggard, womanless, and cut off from music. . . . Ronan has brought me low, God has exiled me from myself - soldiers, forget the man you knew.'' Most of the texts in this edition were published during SH’s lifetime, some posthumously; several appeared multiple times, a few once; one is published here for the first time. It is a body of writing carefully and confidently accomplished – even if, ‘in the case of translation,’ as he observed, ‘it is even truer than usual that a poem is never completed, merely abandoned’ ( SF, viii). from which vantage point he gazes down, terrified yet furiously articulate. From the heights of his mad agony, Sweeney makes sad, beautiful, thrilling poems. He is the voice of darkness and nightmare but also, in his naked and ravaged Ellmann, Richard. "Heaney Agonistes." Rev. of Station Island, by Seamus Heaney. The New York Review of Books. March 14, 1985.

Edel Bhreathnach, “Perceptions of Kingship in Early Medieval Irish Vernacular Literature”, in Lords (...) The “wild man in the woods” genre is ancient and extends beyond Europe. William Sayers has argued t (...) Booth, James, editor, New Larkins for the Old: Critical Essays, St. Martin's Press (New York, NY), 2000. Titled ‘Prayer’, the unpublished translation in this edition has come to us as a clean, unmarked typescript discovered in the archives of the National Library of Ireland. Whether it was intended to be revised by the author, or perhaps be submitted for publication, we cannot be sure, but we do have a guide as a precedent. ‘To a Wine Jar’, the text that opens this book, found its way from typescript to publication thirty years after it was finished and did so without revision.Throughout his career, Seamus Heaney invoked medieval literary allusion, adaptation, and translation to punctuate his iterations of Irish history. [1]And not, as one might expect, to catalyze a nostalgic sense of lost authenticity, but extensively and strategically, to transformative structural ends. To elucidate a ‘transformation’ is to speak of the coeval nature of latency, of potentiality, alongside those qualities that outlast an ending. As Heaney’s translation of Sweeney Astrayopens: “the why and wherefore of [one’s] fits and trips, and alsowhat happened afterwards.” To transformis supremely a matter of artifice: to incarnate a subject’s alterity requires exposing narrative architecture, a willingness to display ‘character’ as an instance of technê, through which modes of art fluctuate or combine. The result for Heaney is often an episodic, associative, rhetorical structure designed to privilege perception over physicality, thus dilating the historical present. In Irish: ‘the Otherworld” is a repository of that-which-is-inherently-fantastic. In modern Irish, saolsignifies, alternately, ‘life’, ‘time’, and ‘world’, and is distinct from the pedestrian noun for world “domhan” which can’t be combined with any term for “other” in idiomatic use.

Part lunatic, part prophet, mad Sweeney-the-bird-man is both physically and spiritually translated from historical figure to mythic archetype and in his metamorphosis he becomes the suffering vatic poet. “The world goes on but I return / to haunt myself. I freeze and burn. / I am the bare figure of pain” (61). As a medieval source-text, Sweeney suggests to Heaney a tradition that enables ecological thought, what the poet describes as “poetry piercingly exposed to the beauties and severities of the natural world…extend[ing] our sense of location to include ‘anywheres.’” [2]

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Washington Post Book World, January 6, 1980; January 25, 1981; May 20, 1984; January 27, 1985; August 19, 1990. This balancing of slowness with speed, casualness with concentration, is not merely a linguistic technique or structural device; it reflects the very core of the poem. Sweeney is mad, in this world. His inspired frenzies occur on a familiar stage. To The “wild man in the woods” genre is ancient and extends beyond Europe. William Sayers has argued that Buile Suibhne bears striking similarities to the story of Nebuchadnezzar as he appears in the Book of Daniel. See William Sayers, “The Deficient Ruler as Avian Exile: Nebuchadnezzar and Suibhne Geilt”, Ériu, vol. 43, 1992, p. 217-220; Penelope B. R. Doob, Nebuchadnezzar’s Children: Conventions of Madness in Middle English Literature, New Haven – London, Yale University Press, 1974. See also Bridgette Slavin, “The Irish Birdman: Kingship and Liminality in Buile Suibhne”, in Text and Transmission in Medieval Europe, Chris Bishop (ed.), Newcastle Upon Tyne, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007, p. 17-45. Stephen Regan compellingly brings into dialogue Sweeney Astray with Heaney’s collection Station Island, also published in 1984 (Stephen Regan, “Seamus Heaney and the Making of Sweeney Astray”, p. 333-338). Ibid., p. 13, 32. Jos Smith briefly suggests that Sweeney can be read as an example of Bennett’s “crossings”. See Jos Smith, The New Nature Writing: Rethinking the Literature of Place, New York, Bloomsbury, 2017, p. 71-72.

Yews were strongly associated with kingship in medieval Irish culture. In the story of the Fianna, (...) New Statesman, April 25, 1997; September 18, 1998, review of Opened Ground, p. 54; April 15, 2001, p. 53.AB - Drawing on Jane Bennett’s theory of “crossings and enchantment”, this essay considers interspecies transformations in Seamus Heaney’s Sweeney Astray (1983). As a bird-man, Mad King Sweeney discovers that the arboreal environment is a vibrantly interstitial space in which paganism and Christianity coexist. By negotiating this liminal space, he opens himself to forms of attachment and enchantment that radically ameliorate his accursed existence in the trees. Fergus Kelly, “Trees in Early Ireland”, Irish Forestry: Journal of the Society of Irish Foresters, vol. 56, no. 1, 1999, p. 41. The other “lords” were oak, hazel, ash, pine, holly, and apple. Trees were evaluated by their usage, their comparative stature, and their longevity, and a complex system of penalties was in place for their misuse. Indeed, there are surviving references in 7 th-century texts to a lost law tract titled Fidbretha (Tree Judgments) that indicates woodland as a legal jurisdiction. See Niall Mac Coitir, Irish Trees: Myths, Legends and Folklore, Cork, The Collins Press, 2003, p. 13. If the poem were kept at this pitch from beginning to end, it would become almost unendurable. Flann O'Brien, who used the figure of Sweeney in his comic novel ''At Swim-Two-Birds,'' realized this, and so his Sweeney makes us The universal dimension of SH’s local preoccupations and the redressing power of literature across confines and cultures are made evident in an interview with Jon Snow for Britain’s Channel 4 News (1999) in which SH draws a parallel between the situation in Northern Ireland and events in Beowulf, which he had recently completed. Because of their ‘extreme ordeal, a little exhaustion, and tremor’, the people of Ulster, like those in the Old English epic poem, he said, ‘know a lot’ about danger, dread, hurt and suffering. This is ‘the general condition of species at the end of the century’, observes SH, ‘and the particular condition of people in Northern Ireland’ (Heaney 1999e, 4:34–5:49).