A dream of jealousy seamus heaney

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Nobel Lecture by Seamus Heaney

The Sweeney Redevivus poems are fascinating in terms of voicing. Allegorically the title alludes to a biblical grouping of people who set themselves up as judges, precursors perhaps of the group of literati surrounding Heaney in his Belfast days whom he judged to have reacted with unwarranted unkindness following his move to the Irish Republic in He paints the scene: externally the monastery work-room the hush of the scriptorium ; internally the unpleasant things that gathered inside the scribes like a dark growth, a black pearl blocking their pores like the lumps of ink that interfered with the smooth flow of their writing the old dry glut inside their quills. The twentieth-century poet absent from Ulster had similar experiences. Heaney the poet puts the jealous scribes in their place: let them remember this not inconsiderable contribution to their jealous art his use of litotes invites us to correct what he is saying.