| Seamus Heaney's elegies detail the poet's progress in an ever-deepening relationship with the dead. Through an analysis of his usage of the conventions of the genre and a recognition of the Freudian implications of the elegy, this relationship is presented as moving through three stages. In his first stage Heaney introduces two inversions of the genre, the cultural elegy and the proleptic elegy, presenting these and personal elegies on subjects that he keeps at an emotional distance. When he does consider the death of someone closer to him, his use of the historical conventions of the elegy is sometimes formulaic and even awkward. In his middle period, the subjects of his elegies are closer friends and family members, and his elegies show an increasing warmth and growing comfort with the tropes of the genre. A liminal stage is explored in "Station Island," where the elegiac conventions are reversed, and the dead mourn Heaney's past. In his most recent period, encompassing his last two collections, Heaney's relationship with the dead moves from a horizontal to a vertical axis, and these elegies contain his most sure-handed usage of the elegiac forms. In the closing section of his most recent work, after exhausting the formal implications of the genre, Heaney presents considerations of "the marvelous," or the afterlife. This movement beyond death is both a natural progression for the poet and a foreshadowing of what readers may expect in his next collections. |
