Seamus Heaney

Seamus Heaney was born to a Catholic family in Protestant Northern Ireland in 1939. He was born after Irish independence, but Northern Ireland was deep in conflict at the time he lived there. His poetry reflects the memories and unconscious of the Irish people (Greenblatt 2823). Heaney directly covers the Northern Irish conflicts in some of his poems, including the poem “Casualty”. In this poem, Heaney describes the images of death after the British Army killed thirteen Irish Catholics in the 1972 Bloody Sunday killings. Heaney writes in this poem that “After they shot dead / The thirteen men in Derry. / PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said, / BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday / Everybody held / His breath and trembled” (Heaney 2829, ll. 41-46). The writing on the walls refers to the British paratroopers that killed the Irish, or “bogside”. Heaney’s fascination with Irish bogs was an allusion to the memories of the Irish people. Heaney felt that the Iron Age people found in the bogs were similar to the deep implanted memories of all the Irish people. Heaney still lives today, and shows how the Irish people of today still have deep memories of injustice – decades after they finally achieved independence.