Remembering to Forget: Heaney and 1798 Revisited

Remembering to Forget: Heaney and 1798 Revisited Guy Beiner (bio) “Memory has always been fundamental for me. In fact, remembering what I had forgotten is the way most of the poems get started. . . . but there’s no knowing where a remembered image will lead you.” seamus heaney1 Dissertations, articles, and books have been written about the centrality of memory in Seamus Heaney’s writing. When it comes to historical memory, perhaps no poem in his oeuvre is more iconic than “Requiem for the Croppies,” in which Heaney succeeded—as acknowledged early on by Brendan Kennelly—in “compressing an entire period of history into fourteen lines.”2 A first-person recollection of the defeat of the United Irish rebels, nicknamed “Croppies” for their short hairstyle, the poem also signals the resurgence of their legacy. This fast-paced sonnet has been repeatedly recited at commemorations of the 1798 rebellion, particularly during the bicente-nary in 1998 when it was inscribed on monuments in Castlecomber, Co. Kilkenny; Curraha, Co. Meath; and Dundalk, Co. Louth.3 Yet, rather than providing a definitive memorial text, for Heaney it marked the beginning of a troubled creative engagement with the heritage of the United Irishmen, which was as much about disremembering as about remembering. The poem touches upon a hidden culture of social forgetting in which the poet himself was submerged even as he pursued imaginative attempts to challenge, if not quite countervail, its dominance. The traces of this uneasy engagement with memory can be found in Heaney’s published work, as well as [End Page 51] in drafts found in his archival manuscripts preserved in the National Library of Ireland that he could not bring himself to publish. The Memory of the Dead The Heaney family farm in the townland of Mossbawn and the parish of Bellaghy, Co. Derry, was just five miles away from Toombridge Co. Antrim, a site famously associated with the 1800 execution of the local United Irish folk hero Roddy McCorley (figure 1). Mossbawn was also three miles away from Castledawson, the ancestral seat of James Chichester-Clark, a unionist politician of Protestant Ascendancy lineage who would become prime minister of Northern Ireland from 1969 to 1971. This sense of in-betweenness was meaningful for Heaney: “I had Roddy McCorley at Toome Bridge and I had the Chichester Clarks at Castledawson and since then I’ve thought of this as a symbolic placing for a Northern Catholic, to be in between the marks of nationalist local sentiment on the one hand, and the marks of colonial and British presence on the other.”4 Situated within this delicate balance, the traditions of Ninety-Eight with which he was familiar from childhood were not explicitly related to contemporary politics. Heaney described the household at Mossbawn as belonging to “the Papish rather than the Republican class” without “any hint of blistering Republican dogma.” Growing up, he would hear less about the Easter Rising of 1916 with its more immediate political implications for twentieth-century militant republicanism than about the United Irishmen of 1798. He recalled that “when people met in the house, they would sing songs or recite poems about ’98.”5 A cousin of his father was a fount of local lore “whose wont it was, when he had had a few drinks,” to recite poetry about Henry Joy McCracken, the leader of the United Irishmen in Antrim.6 Heaney’s mother had an affection for “rebel songs,” such as “Boolavogue”—a rousing ballad about the rebellion in Wexford written by P. J. McCall for the [End Page 52] centenary celebrations in 1898. She also prized the poem “Who Fears to Speak of ’98?” by John Kells Ingram (1823–1907), first published in the Young Ireland newspaper The Nation in 1843 under the title “The Memory of the Dead” and since elevated to a nationalist hymn. Heaney recalled that more recent republican ballads, popular at the time of the IRA 1950s Border Campaign, “were more listened to on radio than sung around the house” (SS 135).7 Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. “Execution of Rody McCorley on the Bridge of Toome.” Francis Joseph Bigger, Rody MacCorly: “Who Fears...