“An art that knows its mind”: prayer, poetry and post-Catholic identity in Seamus Heaney’s “Squarings”

Abstract

Seamus Heaney’s “Squarings” sequence from his 1991 collection Seeing Things speaks of the “virtue of an art that knows its mind”. This sequence attempts to know the mind in both its immanent and transcendent aspects, through the art of poetry. Heaney is writing in this sequence about issues of the spirit, about the numinous and the search for transcendence. The poems have what one could term a religious subtext and yet they are not religious – in terms of Jean-Luc Nancy’s triadic formulation, they are more poetry and philosophy than prayer. And yet this article argues that they are prayer as well, but a prayer transformed – almost a new form of secular prayer which acknowledges that which is beyond the range of human experience but which does so on its own terms, without any overt reference to the rules and precepts of the Roman Catholic Church, but which channels religious symbolism as a type of cultural unconscious throughout the sequence.