The Conncection Between William Butler Yeats And Seamus Heaney
William Butler Yeats and Seamus Heaney were both very influential poets who lived through a time of National struggle and Identity. Yeats lived through things such as the Easter Rising, and the Irish civil war. Heaney lived through Bloody Sunday, troubles and the violence that came with 30 years of death and national hardship. Both poets wrote major poems about the deaths of someone associated with the main violent even of their lifetime. Yeats wrote “Easter 1916” about the men who fought and died trying to end British rule in Ireland. Similarly, Heaney wrote “Casualty”, an elegy about the death of a man who ignored the curfew of a town and was killed. While both poets write poems with similar topics, it is also evident that Heaney is influenced by Yeats.
Both poems are elegies in their own ways. The poem starts, and Yeats tells about how he does not particularly enjoy talking to the other people he meets at the pub. He mostly makes small talk to other using “polite meaningless words” And every now and then, he'll tell a funny joke or story that might get a laugh, but he doesn't really care about his interactions with these people. That is until he sees them lose their life in the Easter Rising, when “A terrible beauty is born.” He talks about Countess Constance Markievicz, who helped out with the effort, along with some other people he knew who could have had bright futures if they hadn't gotten executed for treason. Yeats talks uncertainty about his superiority, and ends the poem with him starting to wonder if these people he's mentioning might actually be heroes.
Casualty is a much longer elegy with three stations. The first and final parts lament his death and show sorrow for the loss of his life. The second part, however, does not praise him, and the subject of the poem is not described as ideal in his life in any way, to the point where he could not quite define who the victim was. The speaker knows his motivations and why he was inclined to do it but it is not clear if he was a good person or if his reactions to the conflict around him are good reactions.
Both poems have backdrops of Ireland in dangerous times. Heaney uses the aftermath of Bloody Sunday in the background of the poem in the line “PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said,/ BOGSIDE NIL”, and Yeats’ poem background is in Ireland (probably the city of Dublin) sometime after the Uprising. They both memorialize the lost lives of men whom they knew, and they are both elegies that one could read for the funeral of these two men.
However with the main topics of the poems, they are also different. Yeats’ poem is much more hopeful in the end, with a “terrible beauty” being born after the men’s deaths, as the deaths of the resistor s would go on to fuel the struggle for a free and independent Ireland, free from British influence. Yeats’ poem tells of how there is hope for the future, whereas Casualty gives off. Unlike the executed leaders of the Easter Rebellion who sacrificed their lives in order to assume a role in the uprising, the pub-loving fisherman of Heaney’s poem refuses to abide by a curfew in order to indulge in his nightly pint, and is killed without having any part in the struggle and sacrifice others are taking.
The connection between Yeats and Heaney with turning is also significant. Turning, one of Yeats’ favorite verbs to use makes a large appearance in “The Second Coming,” a poem about a dark prophecy about the center of civilization not holding as the beast of the apocalypse famously approached towards Bethlehem.
Turning also points towards the process of natural change, returning to our origins within myths and legend. Such turning is present in the very action of figurative language, which turns one thing into another; in verse movement itself, which turns from the end of one line to the beginning of the next; and in rhyme, which turns us back through a poem as we listen for the acoustic correspondences.
In Casualty, the fisherman is turning his back on the curfew and captures the fisherman “as he turned / In that bombed offending place”, And it signals Heaney’s turning to the art of elegy, with its shifts between public utterance of private feeling, to commemorate the fisherman. It is also through the act of elegy that the role of observer shifts from the fisherman observing the poet in the pub, to the poet watching the fisherman in his haunted imagination.
Yeats and Heaney both wrote poems of a nation under tough times, and each had their own way of interpreting what the deaths of these people would mean for a country under such tumultuous times.
