Now I am not purposely picking longer poems every week. It just so happens that number 33 on the top 100 poems list is yet another long poem. But don’t worry it is a great one! It also features on my top 12 Seamus Heaney poems.
The poem Clearances is about Seamus Heaney’s relationship with his mother and the townland of Mossbawn where he spent his formative years.
Seamus Justin Heaney was born on 13th April 1939, the first of nine children. His father owned and worked a small farm of some fifty acres at the family farmhouse called Mossbawn, situated between the villages of Castledawson and Toomebridge.
Here are my notes on this excellent poem by Seamus Heaney, with a link to the full poem.nbsp;
Clearances
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.
Clearances is a sequence of eight sonnets, opened by a short prefatory poem, that Seamus Heaney wrote after his mother, Margaret Kathleen Heaney, died in 1984. It was published in The Haw Lantern by Faber and Faber in 1987, and it is one of the best loved elegies in modern Irish poetry.
Rather than making one big statement of grief, Heaney builds a picture of his mother from small, ordinary moments. There is an old family story about a Protestant ancestor who married into a Catholic family, an imagined homecoming where her own father welcomes her back to the house she grew up in, mother and son peeling potatoes together while the rest of the house was at Mass, the two of them folding the washing, and her habit of getting big words wrong so she would never seem to put on airs. Those everyday scenes carry a love that neither of them said out loud very often.
The later sonnets move to her deathbed, where his father finally finds tender words for her, and then to the image that gives the sequence its name: a chestnut tree planted in the year Heaney was born and cut down years later. The empty space it leaves behind becomes a kind of clearing, a place where loss and memory can stand side by side.
Read the full poem: Clearances by Seamus Heaney at the Poetry Foundation. You will also find it in The Haw Lantern (Faber and Faber).
A great poem, isn’t it?
My final thoughts on the poem, “Clearances”. It transcends the boundaries of a mere eulogy. It stands as a celebration of the mundane moments that quietly shape us, the ancestral ties that bind us, and the transformative power of memory. In Heaney’s own words, it is the “soul ramifying and forever silent” that we continuously long to hear, an enduring echo of familiarity amidst the cacophony of a changing world.