Funeral Rites A Personal Response

Introduction

Funeral Rites combines the personal and cultural - the private and the public responses to deaths that take place in Heaney's family and wider community. Heaney calls for the deaths to be marked by private and public ritual. It is through the rituals of death that resolution and healing can take place. It is through ritual that the pain of loss and anger can become dissipated and order, stability and peace can be restored.

The First Section

In this first section Heaney focuses on family deaths. We are immediately reminded of the poem Mid Term Break in which Heaney writes about the death of his younger brother. Heaney still at school is called upon to take up the responsibilities of one of the chief mourners within his family and wider community. Private grief is contrasted with Heaney's public display of grief.

In this poem he is older now. Tall enough to be one of the coffin bearers and experienced enough to understand and cope with the loss of a number of family members. But only just. This humility and fragility is picked up in the opening phrase 'I shouldered a kind of manhood'. The pun on the word 'shouldered' picks up the physical and emotional role that Heaney now plays within his community. The phrase, 'a kind of' is informal and conversational. The poem draws from everyday and ordinary experiences.

We have to make assumptions about these family deaths as the focus of the poem here is on the description of the rooms and the bodies of the dead. We are on familiar ground here. We are reminded of poems such as 'The Grauballe Man' and 'The Tollund Man'.

However unlike 'The Grauballe Man' and 'The Tollund Man' - whose deaths were violent there is no direct indication that Heaney's family deaths referred to here are violent as well. However Heaney does write elsewhere of family casualties of the violence in Northern Ireland in poems like 'The Strand at Lough Beg'. Despite there being no direct reference to violent deaths the description of his relatives seems to suggest Heaney's relatives are all laid out in a single room all at the same time reminding us of the 'Stockinged corpses/Laid out in the farmyards...' in 'The Tollund Man'. If Heaney was describing a family massacre we might expect a more detailed, more explicit and direct account of it. Instead the phrase 'And always, in a corner,/the coffin lid,' the adverb 'always' indicates the progress of time.

So I think these are the natural deaths of elderly relatives. Perhaps the 'Their puffed knuckles/had unwrinkled' suggests age. And the contrasting nouns of the first section's 'deaths' with the second section's 'murders' makes this point. But it is not clear - perhaps dileberately.

But Heaney does something similar with these corpses as he does with the other violent bog corpses of say 'Bog Queen' or 'Punishment'.What he does is soften them. He transforms death into something of beauty, something familiar and comforting. The distances that death creates are shortened through a series of phrases culminating with 'Dear soapstone masks,/Kissing their igloo brows...'. In the selective descriptions of the corpses and the paraphernalia of death - for example the 'little gleaming crosses' and 'rosary beads' these deaths are turned into portraits of love, respect and even awe. They become a kind of work of art.


The Second Section

In the second section there is a broadening of the scope of the poem. Heaney's focus turns from family deaths to 'neighbourly murder[s]'. In this term he is referring to the sectarian violence that dominated Northern Irish politics during the mid twentieth century.

This violence is an expression of the conflict between two cultures, religions and national identities. On one side is the Roman Catholic and Republican community. Their goal is a united Ireland independent of British rule and influence. This community draws its identity from pre-history, from Viking, Celtic and the early Christianity of Patrick in the 5th century and the Classical civalisation. The second group are Protestant, British and Unionist. A country occupied and deeply influenced by the Roman Empire and Norman France as well as Viking. Britain is seen as a seafaring nation that developed a strong culture of trading, industrialisation and colonisation.

The conflict between these two groups has developed over hundreds of years and Heaney refers to this conflict specifically in the second and third sections of the poem. We are shocked by the phrase 'neighbourly murder' - the idea of murders taking place within communities is picked up in poems like 'The Tollund Man' and 'Punishment'. These murders have taken place on British soil. And not one murder but hundreds of murders stretched out over decades. The need for ritual is described as instinctive and powerful. Yet Heaney describes the rituals as comforting and peaceful. The phrase 'temperate footsteps' the adjective 'temperate' picks up on moderation and restraint rather than anger and revenge the traditional response to sectarian violence.

Heaney draws on the distant and recent Irish past to give the rituals of death and peace authority and legitamacy. He wants to break the culture of violence so embedded with the Roman Catholic culture. So he makes a reference to the burial 'chambers of the Boyne'. These are neolithic burial mounds built around 2000 years ago. The markings link the stones to the bronze age.

Heaney imagines a funeral procession. It moves to the sounds of thousands of car engines as a whole nation mourns its deaths. The sound of the engines becomes the music for these imagined funerals. Heaney is making a point about the traditional rituals of sectarian funerals accompanied with gunshots, drumming and tribal music. The picture here is one of peace and resolution. It is 'somnambulant women' the widows that contemplate the 'triumph' of a peaceful funeral picked up in the noun phrase, 'Quiet as a serpent' - a Celtic symbol.

I think that Heaney is desperate for some resolution to the situation in Ireland. For Heaney I think that conventional Christianity - in the form of Roman Catholicism and Protestantism - has failed. It cannot offer Ireland the solutions it needs. It exists in Ireland as a tribal, sectarian and empty of spiritual power. Only representing and reduced to the political identities of two conflicting ideologies. Therefore he turns to a pre Christian spiritual tradition for inspiration. Heaney is vague about what the past can offer. He seems to have turned his back on Christ and the full meaning of that sacrifice. Instead he looks to Ireland's ancient past and the figure of Gunnar - a great Norse warrior.

He offers a message of peace to these divided communities. I don't think his message of peace would have been received sympathetically by the extremists in these communities and his message as a poet must have come at a price

The Third Section

In the final section of the poem Heaney offers his readers an alternative to a barbaric image we have of the past of waring tribes motivated by hatred and revenge.
He uses this image to guide the present and future state of Ireland. He continues to imagine a funeral where personal pain and loss are no longer transformed into hatered, anger, and revenge.