Introduction

Summary

Come back past

philology and kennings,

re-enter memory

where the bone's lair

is a love-nest

in the grass.

In Seamus Heaney's poem ‘Bone Dreams’, the speaker/dreamer discovers layers of northern and personal history by delving through the linguistic past. A ‘White bone found / on the grazing’ is recognized as a verbal artefact at once through the ‘rough, porous / language of touch’ (p. 27). Its imaginative scope soon expands to ‘Bone-house’, later italicized as the Old English kenning ‘ban-hus’: a found object, like the bone itself, part of the ‘coffered / riches’ of grammatical knowledge granted to those surrounding the fire-warmed benches of the heroic, intimate thinking space that the compound represents (pp. 27, 28). This treasure-trove of linguistic memory is not reached easily. The speaker's earlier reaction is to ‘wind’ the bone ‘in the sling of mind / to pitch it at England’ (p. 27), an action reminiscent both of David versus Goliath, and of the street violence of 1970s Northern Ireland, signalling the place of (the) English as invader and colonizer. ‘Bone Dreams’, however, is far from simply oppositional, at times channelling an unpredictably erotic force through its responses to language, body, and landscape: here the bone's fall in the fields of England seems already to have generative potential, echoing classical myths of Cadmus and Jason, both of whom sowed teeth that sprang up as warriors. The speaker then ‘push[es] back / through dictions’, plotting linguistic history in reverse and working past accreted layers of Elizabethan, French and Latin to arrive at ‘the scop's / twang, the iron / flash of consonants / cleaving the line’ (p. 28). The Anglo-Saxon scop (poet, maker) is also a linguistic warrior, whose blade/tongue both breaks up (cleaves) the poetic line, and paradoxically structures or holds it together (cleaves in its other sense). Heaney's own short lines and their rhythmic music echo the half lines of Old English verse, while the variety of sound effects in kenning-rich phrases such as ‘love-den, blood-holt, / dream-bower’ (p. 29) compound the technical and thematic energies of the poem.