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Manuscript drafts of the poem show Heaney working through these contexts as he imagines the severed head, examined in what follows. These modes of signification, and the ways in which they overlap, are key to understanding the poems of North and, in particular, ‘Strange Fruit’, in which the speaker's and reader's gaze is focused on a beheaded girl. By drawing on her work, Heaney conflates pre-Christian and Christological contexts. Ross explores historical contexts for the severed head but does not elucidate the parallel she makes with the Christian Cross. This can perhaps be explained in part because Heaney references her work in the version of the essay published in Preoccupations: Selected Prose 1968–1978 but not in the version published in Finders Keepers: Selected Prose 1971–2001. Ross's influence on the poems of North has gone largely unnoticed by critics of Heaney's work. The text he cites in fact comes from Ross's Everyday Life of the Pagan Celts (Batsford, 1970), under the chapter title Heaney provides. 5Heaney notes that he read this passage in a chapter entitled ‘The Religion of the Pagan Celts’ and gives the source as Pagan Celtic Britain: Studies in Iconography and Tradition (Routledge, 1967).
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It is indeed … a kind of shorthand symbol for the entire religious outlook of the pagan Celts. This is the symbol of the severed human head in all its various modes of iconographic representation and verbal presentation, one may find the hard core of Celtic religion. 4Īlongside Glob, Heaney highlights the formative influence of Celtic scholar, Anne Ross, quoting her work where she turns her attention to:Ī symbol which, in its way, sums up the whole of Celtic pagan religion and is as representative of it as is, for example, the sign of the cross in Christian contexts. While his narrative catalogues and mythologizes the discoveries made in Danish bogs in the 1950s, it is the photographic image that seems to best preserve the dead and prevent their decay in modern memory. 3 The visual equivalent to bog water, in Glob's book, is the photograph. In the first sentence of the text Glob quotes from a Danish almanack of 1837: ‘There is a strange power in bog water which prevents decay’. These are high quality black and white reproductions on glossy paper with descriptive notes. Of the 116 pages in Glob's book, sixty-four of them – over half – are photographs. Glob's influence has been extensively documented in criticism of Heaney's poetry, but primarily as a textual rather than a visual one. Glob's The Bog People (1969) on what would become his bogland poems and the poems of North. In his 1974 essay, ‘Feeling Into Words’, Heaney describes the profound influence of P.V.
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This way of seeing is the poem's great achievement, in both aesthetic and ethical terms. From Meeropol and Holiday Heaney learns to see through the eyes of the Other in the very act of exposing the Other. Like Meeropol, Heaney is haunted by a photograph – something that becomes clear by analyzing the process of composition discernible over ten pages of manuscript drafts of ‘Strange Fruit’. Yeats, and John Montague, 2 but I want to argue that the poem's greatest debt is a visual rather than textual one. With the iconography of the severed head, Heaney's poem owes potential debts to Oscar Wilde, W.B. It was published in the mid-1930s and then put to music and recorded by Billie Holiday in 1939.
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One of the most critically acclaimed poems from Seamus Heaney's North (1975), ‘Strange Fruit’ is indebted to a poem by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish man who had been ‘haunted … for days’ 1 on seeing a photograph of a lynching in which the bodies of two black men hang from trees above a crowd of spectators.