Chapter 5 - ‘Things Beyond Measure’

Summary

The sense of poetic uplift and the attention to absence which Heaney began to explore in The Haw Lantern, soar to new heights in the visionary collection Seeing Things and the two subsequent volumes The Spirit Level and Electric Light. I read Seeing Things alongside Heaney’s uncollected essay ‘Sixth Sense, Seventh Heaven’ and explore the possible influence of the Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain in Heaney’s attention to the surplus nature of language. In the poems of Seeing Things, the world of matter (a dominant theme of Heaney’s early books) gives way increasingly to a more visionary sense. This is picked up in the poems of The Spirit Level where the language of wounds, healing and cures runs as a motif throughout a collection populated by saints, characterised by healing and self-sacrifice. The theme of love and grief is picked up in the poems of Electric Light, and especially in the elegies for literary friends in the second part of the collection. Heaney’s growing sense of the truth of Virgil’s lacrimae rerum (‘the tears of things’) will increasingly inform his final two collections.