Heaney s language ın poetıc encounters wıth death

Date

2015-11-18

Author

Sönmez, Margaret Jeanne M.

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Death is everywhere in literature and when describing encounters with the moment of death or with dead bodies writers and speakers often show altered or unusual patterns of language. This paper presents some observations about Heaney's language in poetic representations of dead or dying bodies: what I shall (rather clumsily but, I hope, clearly) call 'death scenes'. Heaney's poetic oeuvre is steeped in references to everyday death from age, disease and accident. These are most frequently introduced into the poems by verbalised memories of the dead, often by remembering their words or by addressing the now-dead figure. Much of the poetry is elegiac, if only because of being haunted by voices from the near or distant past: Ramazani recognizes that, unlike many contemporary poets, Heaney "resumes old-fashioned poetic codes in elegies for friends and family, depicting the dead as singing masters of the soul " (xii), for instance. He also presents death as part of social life: there is a heritage of death and there are death-related customs in every community. Violent death is also referred to in many of his poems, but this is usually done indirectly, often through multiple veils of allusion and only rarely are death scenes directly and visually presented. These rare scenes are most often (though not always) renditions of historical deaths – the killings of the bog people for instance, or references to figures from myth and literature. This paper will not examine such mythical deaths or the demise of historical or literary characters, even though they may be seen as transferred representations of other, actual and more contemporary deaths. It will present language-centred readings of the death scenes from six poems. There is a fair amount of consensus in scholarly and critical discussions about the language of Heaney's poems. Out of a list of the main areas of Heaney's language that have been identified as critically pertinent, a few items may be said to characterise the death scenes

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/73089

Conference Name

Hacettepe Üniversitesi: One Day: Seamus Heaney (18 Kasım 2015)

Collections

Department of Foreign Language Education, Conference / Seminar

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Citation Formats

M. J. M. Sönmez, “Heaney s language ın poetıc encounters wıth death,” presented at the Hacettepe Üniversitesi: One Day: Seamus Heaney (18 Kasım 2015), Türkiye, 2015, Accessed: 00, 2021. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/73089.