Irish Dystopia In Seamus Heaney’s Selected Poems
Irish Dystopia In Seamus Heaney’s Selected Poems

Summary/Abstract: This paper explores the dystopian Irish society represented in Seamus Heaney’s poetry. In his poetry, Heaney seeks a reconciliation with Ireland’s past. Heaney refers to the political and cultural realities of Ireland in his poems; he indicates that the Irish society is a dystopia when he represents the occupation of Ireland, especially by the British, and how to live with its inevitable effects. The oppression and misery that the Irish people lived through are represented particularly in, “Antaeus”, “Hercules and Antaeus”, “At a Potato Digging”, “North”, and “The Ministry of Fear”. The Great Famine, a dystopian event in the Irish historical heritage, is referred to in a critique of the British authorities’ failure to help the starved Irish people. “At a Potato Digging” is overshadowed by historical memories. However, in the poems, “Antaeus”, and “Hercules and Antaeus” Heaney employs Greek myth as a metaphor to refer to the tenacity to the Irish land where we find the Irish ability to be revivified through the soil in spite of the dystopic Ireland since the Irish Catholics have turned into farmers who work for English and Scottish Protestants. The poem, “North” deals with the Irish dystopia represented by the violence of the English-Irish Troubles on the one hand, and the Viking occupation on the other. In the last poem of this chapter, “The Ministry of Fear”, Heaney refers to the days that he spent at school, with his friend Seamus Deane, as dystopian environment because they suffered from class distinction. In this paper, some of Heaney’s dystopian poems are employed to point out the violence imposed upon Ireland throughout centuries to deliver a message to the whole world to renounce violence.

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