Introduction

Summary

Humming

Solders all broken hearts. Death's edge

Blunts on the narcotic strumming.

(Seamus Heaney, ‘The Folk Singers’ (DN 42))

Seamus Heaney begins his second collection of prose writings, The Government of the Tongue, with a prefatory essay entitled ‘The Interesting Case of Nero, Chekhovs Cognac and a Knocker’. He opens the essay with a telling anecdote. In 1972, he says, he had arranged to meet the singer David Hammond in Belfast in order to go to the BBC studios in the city and put together a tape of songs and poems for a mutual friend of theirs, living in Michigan. In the event, the tape did not get made. As Hammond and Heaney made their way to the studios, the city was rocked by a series of explosions. The air filled with the sound of the sirens of emergency vehicles converging on the city centre. Heaney tells us

It was music against which the music of the guitar that David unpacked made little impression. So little, indeed, that the very notion of beginning to sing at that moment when others were beginning to suffer seemed like an offence against their suffering. He could not raise his voice at that cast-down moment. He packed the guitar again and we both drove off into the destroyed evening. (GT, p. xi)

It is no surprise that Heaney should choose to preface his book with an account of this incident. Reflected in the story, we find some of the central concerns which have both motivated and troubled the poet's career as a writer. Some of these conflicts Heaney himself makes explicit as he proceeds through the essay. Central among them are what Heaney notes as the conflicting demands of art and life, or, put another way, of song and suffering. On the day in question, Heaney tells us, he and Hammond had felt that their art of song and poetry was simply silenced in the face of the suffering occasioned by the brutal scenes taking shape outside the studio walls. ‘What David Hammond and I were experiencing, at a most immediate and obvious level,’ he tells us, ‘was a feeling that song constituted a betrayal of suffering’ (GT, p. xii).