Term Paper on "Churning Day by Seamus Heaney"

Term Paper 4 pages (1551 words) Sources: 3

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Seamus Heaney

On the surface, the poem by Nobel Prize Laureate Seamus Heaney called Churning Day, is a wonderful journey into the past, into the old ways of making butter when technology and the corporate world were far from becoming part of Europe. The poem is both a history lesson and a reflection of Heaney's agricultural upbringing. It is also in a very real way a testament to his sharp eye and attentive ears towards the culture in rural Ireland in which he was steeped in and "plunged in" - like poetry itself.

Because the structure of the poem uses enjambment the entire length, Heaney kind of gives the reader a sense of the movement of the hands churning, moving, continually. When you make butter, you don't stop for a while and rest; you keep turning, churning, and the poem has that same continuous motion as well.

In the poem it is clear that Heaney sees his boyhood old-world family lifestyle as a metaphor, and all the things that were part of those experiences are building blocks for his storytelling. But he shows how highly intelligent he is by his strategic use of words - just enough descriptiveness and emotion. Still, he does not let the tools of poetry overpower the poem. As a poet he has the license to pour forth with images and metaphors, but he handles this poem with grace, the same as his family handled the chores of making food with grace and deliberation.

In his lecture to the Nobel Foundation, Heaney explains that he was the "eldest child of an every-growing family." That family was crowded together in three rooms in a thatched farmhouse. The experience, he explained, was intimate and "physical" and "creaturely" - which suggests that he and his family were a bit like shrewd and productive animals, living off the land and cooperating with one another the way the natural world operates. Rabbits have their communities and when babies are born, they become part of that little culture; and the same with mice, and ants, and squirrels. He doesn't have to mention those species because he has given the reader and the listener the word "creaturely," and that is enough for the active mind to take it from there. Nature has its way, and life moves forward because of rituals and duties.

For Heaney, everything that happened in his family life, and in the surroundings and materials of his existence, caused something else to happen. This is the substance of his poem, as well, because each action causes another action, or a reaction - a product - based on the initial action. And like the poet who is skillful in the economy of words, the eye becomes trained to observe the pragmatism of those reactions and results, just like the young eyes of the poet witness the butter being made from the fresh milk of the cow.

First, a look at his Nobel lecture shows that in his boyhood, when a train passed by, the earth shook and the surface of the drinking water in the bucket would "ripple delicately, concentrically, and it utter silence." Did Heaney write that down as a young man, or did he simply have a great ability to recall what happened when a train passed? It doesn't matter, because the reader is there with him. The air around him was "alive" and it was "signaling too," he wrote in his lecture.

Why did he say "signaling"? How can the air be "alive"? This is how the sensitive person sees the world. Through his senses. He feels the world, hears the world, and tastes the world. The wind in his childhood "swept" down, through a hole that was bored in the corner of the kitchen window, right into the "innards" of their radio. The radio is made human, and the voices that came out of the radio - right after "a little pandemonium of burbles and squeaks" - were of the BBC, reporting on WWII.

So readers know that Heaney grew up during the war, and heard all the latest news about prisoners of war that were captured, cities that were bombed, bombers that were lost by the allies. What is also very interesting in his Nobel lecture is that those moments as a child listening to voices coming out of the radio led Heaney to later ("as the years went on and my listening became more deliberate") become enchanted with the story being told, not the news itself. "What I was after was the thrill of a story..." And he knows now that those moments of listening led him on a "...journey which has brought me now to this honoured spot." The platform felt more like a "space station than a stepping stone," and hence, he allowed himself "the luxury of walking on air." His poetry reflects his love of a good story.

He says he loved Robert Frost for his "farmer's accuracy" and "his wily down-to-earthness." That love of describing what happens on a farm apparently led him to try to be as accurate as he could in Churning Day.

The "thick crust, coarse-grained as limestone rough-cast" describes the cream on the top of the butter mix, that looks like the cement that is plastered on the outside of houses. And the crocks, to his eye, were like bombs (probably the size of bombs that fell on Germany). The process of milking cows was not just a matter of hands and fingers working up and down on a cow's udder, the process was a "hot brewery of gland, cud, and udder." Brewery is about making beer, of course, but in the larger sense, it is telling a story about the action inside a cow; the cow chews grass, makes a cud, and its glands help transform the grass into milk which is made available to humans through the udder.

This is a metaphor for how life works; in seven words, the poet takes a rather involved process and delivers it to the reader, just like getting fresh milk out of the cow. Grass grows because there is soil, nutrients, and moisture from the sky; cows eat grass and become a brewery of natural juices and chemicals. Then the milk must be brought out of the cows on a regular basis twice a day. Then the milk is allowed to ferment (which is a stinky process) in preparation for churning day. Everything has to be cleaned very well before the process of making butter can begin. The "hoped churn" is "scoured with plumping kettles" (boiled to reduce the possibility of impurities) and there was an echo to the poet's ear as the scrubbing for purity continued.

His mother "set up rhythms" that "slugged and thumped for hours" - so much so that her arms "ached" and her hands were "blistered." This is the price that has to be paid for survival. Farmers know this, and certain Heaney's family lived the life of survival in rural Europe. But in that context, there was the rhythm of life for a young man, watching bowls be sterilized so the food wouldn't spoil, watching the hands of his mother working endlessly, and finally a "heavy and rich" substance began to emerge, like "gold flecks" that were retrieved after hard work. "The house would stink long after churning day" - as "acrid" as a "sulphur mine" - but that was a small price to pay for the "gilded gravel in the bowl" (again, gold is the image that resulted from all those processes, beginning with the grass the cow ate).

In the house where he lived, they moved with "gravid ease" (gravid is like being pregnant, so there was expectancy, preparation for a new beginning, and this is what makes… READ MORE

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