‘Sunk past its gleam in the meal bin’: the kitchen as source in the poetry of Seamus Heaney (Pre-print version)

Abstract

This article will examine the use of food, and especially food as cooked in a kitchen, as a symbolic trope in the writing of Seamus Heaney. It will address the kitchen as a locus amoenis of comfort, warmth and positivity in a strand of Heaney’s work. It will suggest a correlation between the kitchen as an agent of transformation, and the poem as a similar transforming agency of the raw materials of what Yeats might term ‘the foul rag and bone shop of the heart’ (Yeats 1965, 357). It will analyse Heaney’s complex use of food as an ongoing symbolic trope, and will trace one particular strand of this trope, specifically that of comfort, security and positive transformation, across a number of poems in his oeuvre. It will also suggest that Heaney’s focus on food as a symbol is another example of his firm location as a poet in the European aesthetic tradition, and parallels will be drawn between his use of food and similar ideas of other aesthetic thinkers on the same topic. Much of Heaney’s work looks at the body as an agent of knowledge about the self, and food as a somatic staple develops a symbolic energy in his writing, as it stands in synecdoche for images of hearth, home and security.