Peasant cosmogony

Patrick Joyce, Remembering Peasants: Seamus Heaney understood the landscape in which as a child in small-farm Derry he grew up as ‘sacramental, a system of signs that called automatically upon systems of thinking and feeling.’ Kevin Williams has remarked how the Catholicism of Heaney’s upbringing was part of an environment that was paradoxically not ‘specifically Christian’. Heaney wrote that ‘Much of the flora of the place had a religious force, especially if we think of the root of the word religious in religare, to bind fast. The single thorn tree bound us to a notion of the potent world of the fairies - and when the Blessed Virgin appeared in a thorn bush in Ardboe, a few miles up the country, the fairy tree took on a new set of subliminal attributes. The green rushes bound us to the beneficent spirit of St Brigid: cut on Brigid’s Eve, they were worked into Brigid’s crosses that would deck the rooms and out houses for the rest of the year.’ The poet also tells us that his…