Casualty: A Powerful Elegy Exploring Irish Unrest

Reading Time: 7 minutes

Heaney’s poem Casualty is a powerful elegy, first included in the Field Work (1979) collection and then in Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 (1998). In the poem, the poet describes the death of his fisherman friend, Louis O’Neill, though he does not mention his name. He was one of those British soldiers killed during a protest march. He becomes a casualty, as the title suggests, of the sectarian urban warfare in Northern Ireland. It resembles Yeats’ poem, Easter 1916, as both talk about the risings in Ireland. The poem is divided into three sections, skillfully interwoven without a set rhythm or rhyme scheme, while experimenting with end rhymes.

The opening section recounts the poet’s relationship with his friend. The poet illustrates the man’s behaviour in the pub, emphasising his graceful gestures and the ease and naturalness of his demeanour. The poem begins by reflecting on his friend’s drinking habits—“He would drink by himself.” A seasoned fisherman and drinker, he came alone to the pub every evening after the day’s work and ordered drinks through a series of silent gestures. He would indicate what he wanted by pointing his thumb, turning his eyes towards it, or mimicking the act of pulling off the top of a bottle—“raise a weathered thumb/Towards the high shelf,/Calling another rum/And blackcurrant, without/Having to raise his voice,/Or order a quick stout/By a lifting of the eyes.” Clad in a peaked cap and high waterproof boots—“In waders and peaked cap,” he would sit and drink at the bar until closing time before quietly stepping out into the dark, rainy night- “Into the showery dark”. Though an expert fisherman, he was often out of work and relied on an unemployment allowance (dole). The poet cherished how he carried himself—“I loved his whole manner.”  

In the second stanza of section one, the poet recounts meeting his friend at the pub. When the man meets the poet at the bar and brings up the subject of poetry—“He mentioned poetry”—the poet skilfully sidesteps the topic, steering the conversation towards eels and horses, discussing matters that are entirely mundane—“I would manage by some trick / To switch the talk to eels / Or lore of the horse and cart / Or the Provisionals.” While trying to pry tobacco from a tobacco cake, the fisherman tries to get the poet to talk about poetry. Familiar with Heaney only in the pub or on the boat, the man perceives Heaney’s life as a poet ‘incomprehensible.’ Heaney did not want the man to talk about his creative career, believing he would find it hard to grasp the essence of poetry.

In the concluding stanza of section one, the poet reflects on his friend’s death. The paths of the fisherman and the poet intersect and merge –“But my tentative art/His turned back watches too.” The man approached his work as an art form, and the poet’s art becomes the subject of his life and death. He dies in a pub during a reprisal bombing in response to “Bloody Sunday” in Londonderry. The man was killed – “He was blown to bits/Out drinking in a curfew” when the pub he visited, disregarding the IRA curfew, was destroyed in a reprisal bombing after “Bloody Sunday” in Londonderry. “The thirteen men in Derry/“PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said/BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday.” – here, the reference is to the thirteen people on 30 January 1972 when soldiers of the First Battalion of the Parachute Regiment opened fire during a Civil Rights march in the Bogside in Londonderry. The Bogside retaliated by clamping a curfew on the town and by bombing a pub that broke the Curfew. In this attack, the poet’s friend died.  Fear stalked Derry’s streets that Wednesday. The slogan daubed on the streets resembles entries on a football scoreboard. The suggestion is that both sides, Unionists and Nationalists, played a dangerous game that made life in Northern Ireland dreadful.

The second section takes us to the funeral of the poet’s friend and others who were killed in the bombing. The poet reflects on the fisherman’s defiance of the curfew, his death at the pub, and the troubling moral issues raised by that incident. The first stanza of the second section begins with a description of the funeral: “It was a day of cold, raw silence.” The wind-blown vestments—“the wind-blown surplice and soutane” of the priests, along with the flower-laden coffins emerging one after another from the church, resembled bunches of flowers gently floating on a stream –“Rained-on, flower-laden / Coffin after coffin / Seemed to float from the door / Of the packed cathedral / Like blossoms on slow water.” This evokes pathos and sobriety. The common funeral of the victims, the large number of people who attended the service in the church, who joined the funeral procession, and later stood silently in a close circle around the graves—“Till we were braced and bound / Like brothers in a ring.” — seemed to convey the value of brotherhood in times of crisis.

In the next stanza, the poet shifts from the funeral to the events leading up to his friend’s death. On that day, “But he would not be held / At home by his own crowd.” The poet’s friend belonged to no group; he chose to stand alone, outside the community’s protective embrace. This decision contributed to his tragic fate. He disregarded the curfew imposed by his people, undeterred by threats of imminent violence or by black flag demonstrations. “Whatever threats were phoned / Whatever black flags waved,” he ignored them all. The poet imagines the expression on the man’s face at the time of the explosion—his face may have displayed a strange interplay of remorse and defiance before the body was blown to smithereens. The phrase “Still knowable face” may refer to the time before it became unknowable, as it lingers in the poet’s memory and factors into the poem. The poet concludes the stanza by stating that his longstanding habit of visiting the pub at night led to his breaking the curfew and ultimately caused his death.

The final stanza of section two opens with a line that reveals the poet’s friend’s intense craving for alcohol: “He had travelled far / For he drank like a fish.” After a long day’s work at sea, he would head to the pub each evening, driven by his drinking habit and sociable nature, much like a fish tempted by a poacher’s bait at night – “Swimming towards the lure/Of warm lit-up places”. Then the poet states the crux of the problem and the disturbing questions such incidents raise. How culpable was he that night when he broke the tribe’s complicity? The fisherman had gone to the pub for a drink after a day’s work and unwittingly became an easy target in the sectarian fighting in Northern Ireland. “How culpable was he that last night when he broke our tribe’s complicity?” How guilty was he? Any guilt, if it exists, lies in breaking the curfew his community imposed by drinking in the pub. The poet acknowledges that Irish society is divided into two warring factions, each adhering to a philosophy of tit for tat. He understands tribal ethics; however, the term ‘complicity’ conveys his sense of guilt for being part of the tribe responsible for this crime. Yet, caught in the crossfire of factional politics, the innocent suffer. What are they guilty of? The entire poem reflects on this question. The poet imagines a scene where the deceased, unable to determine the answer to the question of how culpable he was, turns to his educated friend, the poet, for assistance – “Now, you’re supposed to be an educated man, I hear him say. Puzzle me the right answer to that one.” There is no answer. No response can be provided, which is the tragedy of the situation.

In the third section, the poet revisits the funeral. The poet reveals that he did not attend his friend’s funeral: “I missed the funeral.” Although he is absent from the funeral, he imagines the scene in his mind: “Those quiet walkers/And sideways talkers/Shoaling out of his lane/To the respectable/Purring of the hearse…/They move at an equal pace/With the habitual/Slow consolation.” The funeral procession proceeds slowly, its rhythm matching the vehicle’s languid engine. The poet then abruptly shifts from the funeral to a ride through the waters with his friend: “That morning/I was taken in his boat,/The Screw purling turning/Indolent fathoms white, /I tasted freedom with him.” On that chilly day, the sun glimmered on the water while the land lay shrouded in fog. The purr of the car engine from the funeral gently intertwines with that of the man’s fishing boat. The poet envisions setting out with him on the open sea, seeking freedom while grappling with unanswerable questions. This leisurely boat ride offers liberation far from the land’s complexities. The poet parallels his vocation and the fisherman’s as both search for their rightful haunt. The poet sails deep into life’s vast seas, fishing for truth. The fisherman and the poet work in similar rhythms, and their work possesses a distinctive cadence.

The poem concludes with an image of the fisherman wading through midnight rain and rising like an apparition (revenant) at dawn: “Dawn-sniffing revenant/Plodder through midnight rain,/Question me again.” The poet invites the man to question him once more. Not that he has the answer—no, but he recognises that the question would ignite self-examination. He must find an answer, for his country’s future depends on it. The passage of time in the closing lines, from midnight to dawn, holds symbolic significance. It nurtures hope that the country will find its way to a dawn of peace and happiness. This positive suggestion, however feeble, aligns with the final note of all great elegies.

The poet uses a range of poetic devices to explore themes such as loss and identity. The imagery surrounding his fisherman friend, particularly in lines like “His fisherman’s quick eye / And turned observant back,” reflects skill, resilience, and bravery. The sea symbolises endurance and certainty, while enjambment creates a conversational flow and alliteration enriches the lyrical quality. The pub in the poem symbolises human vulnerabilities. Through these techniques, the poet weaves personal loss together with collective tragedy.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 WORKS CITED

Campbell, Siobhán. “Seamus Heaney’s ‘Casualty’—Causal or Casual?” Poetry Ireland Review, no. 113, 2014, pp. 133–134.

Weiner, Joshua. “Seamus Heaney: ‘Casualty’.” Poetry Foundation, 27 Aug. 2008.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/51607/casualty-56d22f7512b97

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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