Working within the Political and Literary Tradition: Seamus Heaney’s “Bog Oak”

Heather Kroes

Despite the advent of the Troubles, the themes in Heaney’s collection “Wintering Out” remain overwhelming pastoral. However, his poems have an underlying question: As a citizen and a poet, how can Heaney stay true to his literary tradition but also reflect on the political turmoil that surrounds him? In his poem “Bog Oak” Heaney speaks to this dichotomy and reveals, through comparison with a historical figure, that the lines are at once ambiguous and polarizing.

The title of the poem, “Bog Oak,” as well as the first stanza stay true to the pastoral expressions characteristic of Heaney’s work. Bog Oak is a type of wood that has been preserved in the bog. Heaney describes it as a “carter’s trophy” (1). By characterizing the wood in terms of Ireland’s colonial past, the bog oak becomes literally and figuratively a kind of artifact of that time. It in turn evokes the “moustached/ dead” (7-8) and “creel-fillers” (8). The physical remnants of Ireland’s colonial past recall the people that occupied that time. Unlike the bog oak, these past people are very detached from the narrator. Instead of being able to share a common historical path, the narrator is an outsider who “might tarry” (6) or “eavesdrop on” (9) these manifestations of the past.

The reason is revealed in the fourth and fifth stanzas: “rain/ blurs the far end/ of the cart track” (13-15) and “The softening ruts/ lead back to no/ ‘oak groves’” (16-18) Time has all but wiped out the artifacts of that age; what remains are the literary and political histories of the place. In the sixth stanza the narrator can “just make out/ Edmund Spenser” (21-22) who is best known for not only his epic poem “Faerie Queene” which glorifies the Tudor monarchy in England but also an inflammatory pamphlet entitled A View on the Present State of Ireland which called for, among other things, the destruction of the Irish culture and language.

The poem depicts Spenser the poet, “dreaming sunlight” (23), but “encroached upon by/ geniuses” (24-25) who come “‘out of every corner/ of the woodes and glennes’” (27-28). While Spenser is first introduced as a purely literary figure, he is being “encroached upon” (24) by not only the traditional Irish inhabitants but also by the quotations from his political pamphlet. By sketching a Spenser whose political views are articulated from his poetic voice, Heaney displays how closely the political and the literary are intertwined.

What is so interesting about this poem is Heaney’s handling of the English tradition and particularly the ambiguity he feels about writing about the Irish Troubles. From his quatrain format, to the references to Ireland’s unremembered colonial past, to the submersion of Spenser the politician and poet, Heaney provides a comparative depiction of the overlapping of the English tradition in literature and politics that he belongs to by nature of his vocation and place of origin.