adam piette
strikes and shots’, the burning of the houses, the raids (‘Men on ladders|Climbed
intoroselight’). The dream, for Deane, concentrates down to a single fixed image,
signifying the ‘Russian’ interpretation of the Troubles: ‘a burning|In the heart
of winter and a boy running’. The boy running might stand as a figure for the
imagination trying to escape from the ideological forces of the cold’s high authority,
forces which translate Belfast into Moscow, the warfare in Northern Ireland into an
anti-Fascist struggle, the people lost in the deep drifts of the propaganda bedevilling
all Cold War-inflected conflicts.
That boy running represents most of the poets sickened by the violence meted
out against and by their people in the ferocious war. If the Cold War was secretly
underpinning the fanaticisms on the ground in Northern Ireland, from the Marxist-
revolutionary wing of the IRA to the counter-insurgency psyops deployed by the
Special Forces, the poets took their cue from the non-aligned dissident communities
in the Soviet Union and America properly to disengage themselves from the
ideological quagmire. Seamus Heaney learns the pacifist mantra, ‘The end of art is
peace’,^67 from a dream of pre-industrial Ireland, but the true source of his neutral
stance in the Troubles is the example of fellow poets enfranchising themselves from
the wars of the twentieth century: ‘I am neither internee nor informer,’ Heaney
tells us in ‘Exposure’, but an ‘inneremigr ́ e, grown long-haired ́ |And thoughtful;
a wood-kerne||Escaped from the massacre’.^68 The code-word for the resistance
to Hitler and Stalin, ‘inneremigr ́ e’, is stitched together with the protective and ́
survivalist instincts of the Irish peasantry against English incursions. This is Deane’s
boy running, just as Heaney himself could be said to have escaped the massacre
with the 1972 resignation of his Queen’s University Belfast lectureship and move to
the woods of County Wicklow in the South.
It is also an escape to the decolonized territory of Eire, outside the zone of wartime
propaganda. In a poem addressed to Deane, ‘The Ministry of Fear’, Heaney recalls
an encounter with a British soldier, rifling through his letters at a road-block.
The poet realizes there and then that the poetic tradition is closed to the Irish
Catholic:
Ulster was British, but with no rights on
The English lyric: all around us, though
We hadn’t named it, the ministry of fear.^69The propaganda machine of the British Government of the Second World War is
everywhere in Northern Ireland, because this is an ideological war (with its own
cultural apparatus) of a similar magnitude, closing off the subject people’s access to
the traditions of the language.
(^67) Seamus Heaney, ‘The Harvest Bow’, inOpened Ground: Poems 1966–1996(London: Faber,
1998), 184. The source of Heaney’s line is Coventry Patmore.
(^68) Seamus Heaney, ‘Exposure’, ibid. 144. (^69) Heaney, ‘The Ministry of Fear’, ibid. 136.