Sweeney Astray

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Times (London, England), October 11, 1984; January 24, 1985; October 22, 1987; June 3, 1989; September 11, 1998, p. 21; October 29, 1998, p. 44; March 27, 1999, p. 16; September 23, 1999, p. 42; October 26, 1999, p. 50; May 20, 2000, p. 19; April 4, 2001, p. 15; April 17, 2002, p. 21; July 2, 2003, p. 2. The third part is titled "Sweeney Redivivus." It consists of poems (or "glosses" as Heaney terms them) based on the figure of Sweeney from Sweeney Astray (1983), Heaney's translation of the medieval Irish text Buile Suibhne. In his introduction to Sweeney Astray Heaney indicates the significance that the story of Sweeney has for him by writing that it can be seen as "an aspect of the quarrel between free creative imagination and the constraints of religious, political, and domestic obligation." [9] Reception [ edit ] Sweeney is cursed by a Christian cleric named Ronan whom he has insulted and humiliated. As a result, he becomes a mad outcast, a paranoid fugitive from life, a shifty victim of panic who lives on watercress and water and is driven to the tops of trees, Contributor to 101 Poems Against War, edited by Matthew Hollis and Paul Keegan, Faber and Faber (London, England), 2003.

Seamus Heaney's latest book 'Sweeney Astray', a combination of verseand prose, is his version of the old Irish tale 'Buile Suibhne'. Wood, adj., n.2, and adv.”, Oxford English Dictionary Online. Likewise, the Irish word geilt (used to describe Sweeney in the early manuscripts of the text) can either translate as terror, cowardice, frenzy, and fear or can refer to someone who dwells in the woods or deserts: a wild man or woman. See Feargal Ó Béarra, “ Buile Shuibhne: vox insaniae from Medieval Ireland”, in Mental Health, Spirituality, and Religion in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Age, Albrecht Classen (ed.), Berlin, De Gruyter, 2014, p. 242-289 and particularly p. 263-269. Note that Ó Béarra lists as the third definition for the term geilt, based on the Dictionary of the Irish Language, “a crazy person living in the woods and supposed to be endowed with the power of levitation”. He highlights the absence of verifiable other source texts that substantiate such a definition, wondering “what other texts apart from Buile Shuibhne (if any) were excerpted to arrive at such a definition” ( ibid., p. 266). On Heaney and geilt, see Stephen Regan, “Seamus Heaney and the Making of Sweeney Astray”, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies, vol. 21, no. 2, 2015, p. 331-332.

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The repentant aspect of his pilgrimage is reinforced by Sweeney’s description of the inhospitable and wounding arboreal environment. His physical transformation leaves him exposed to the elements and he has no roof over his head as he “roosts” in tree-tops. Thus, despite the refuge offered to Sweeney by the woods, the beauty of his habitat is countered by its roughness, especially during winter season:

Author of introduction) Thomas Flanagan, There You Are: Writing on Irish and American Literature and History, edited by Christopher Cahill, New York Review Books, 2003. N2 - Drawing on Jane Bennett’s theory of “crossings and enchantment”, this essay considers interspecies transformations in Seamus Heaney’s Sweeney Astray (1983). As a bird-man, Mad King Sweeney discovers that the arboreal environment is a vibrantly interstitial space in which paganism and Christianity coexist. By negotiating this liminal space, he opens himself to forms of attachment and enchantment that radically ameliorate his accursed existence in the trees. I mentioned Sweeney as the man of pain apart from the men of purpose. ''Sweeney Astray,'' I believe, will come to be seen as a compelling poem of human pain - the vague yet vivid pain of the waking imagination, an almost unutterable Tain Bo Cuailgne,'' and Joyce's ''Ulysses.'' Both have heavy, tedious moments, but also an ecstatic, soaring quality. We appreciate the moments of flight all the more deeply because we haveReflecting on his fate, Sweeney finds himself between life and death. In this purgatorial state, amidst the branches and the tree-tops, he is no longer firmly grounded on earth, nor has he yet reached heaven. Conclusion Throughout his career, Seamus Heaney invoked medieval literary allusion, adaptation, and translation to punctuate his iterations of Irish history. [1]And not, as one might expect, to catalyze a nostalgic sense of lost authenticity, but extensively and strategically, to transformative structural ends. To elucidate a ‘transformation’ is to speak of the coeval nature of latency, of potentiality, alongside those qualities that outlast an ending. As Heaney’s translation of Sweeney Astrayopens: “the why and wherefore of [one’s] fits and trips, and alsowhat happened afterwards.” To transformis supremely a matter of artifice: to incarnate a subject’s alterity requires exposing narrative architecture, a willingness to display ‘character’ as an instance of technê, through which modes of art fluctuate or combine. The result for Heaney is often an episodic, associative, rhetorical structure designed to privilege perception over physicality, thus dilating the historical present.

Helen Vendler, Seamus Heaney(Harvard, Mass: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 136. The Broighter boat (from the Broighter hoard, in the National Museum of Ireland) Eliot planned a verse drama based on the story, and although he didn't see it through, wrote enough for a small poetry collection, Sweeney Agonistes, in 1932.The long poem is the story of his fall from greatness and the long period that follows before his death. Sweeney seems on his way to recovery, and a local woman felt sorry for him and would leave him milk and food. However, her husband becomes jealous and kills Sweeney with a spear. The place of his death was at the well near Glen Bolcain and is called The Madman’s Well. from which vantage point he gazes down, terrified yet furiously articulate. From the heights of his mad agony, Sweeney makes sad, beautiful, thrilling poems. He is the voice of darkness and nightmare but also, in his naked and ravaged Joep Leerssen, “Wildness, Wilderness, and Ireland: Medieval and Early-Modern Patterns in the Demarc (...)