‘Fosterage’ from ‘Singing School’ from Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966–1996 by Seamus Heaney. Copyright © 1998 by Seamus Heaney. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC. Also reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Seamus Heaney and Katherine Mansfield

The death of Seamus Heaney on 30 August 2013 left thousands of his readers with a sense of personal loss. Although his poetry is deeply rooted in the history and culture of Ireland, it appeals to people all over the world; whether it is about his childhood or the time of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, it says important things about our common human experience. One of his early poems, which sheds some light on Heaney's writing philosophy, may be of special interest to Mansfield scholars. It is ‘Fosterage’, part 5 of the longer poem ‘Singing School’, from the 1975 volume North. In North, Heaney found a way of speaking about the conflict in Northern Ireland and defined his artistic method using the words of Wallace Stevens: ‘Description is revelation.’ Description, Jerzy Jarniewicz observes, has become Heaney's ‘trademark’ – in description his words materialise and become ‘a source of sensuous experience’. The name and the words of Katherine Mansfield are evoked in the poem for a good reason. In her fiction, too, language ‘materialises’, leading to sensuous experience, and offering ‘enlightenment and awareness’; in her stories ‘one event may offer us, in miniature, something which holds true of an entire life, or perhaps of life itself’. In the work of both artists, description, to use the words of Stevens, is ‘intenser than any actual life could be’.