Station Island is a key text in coming to an understanding of the changing nature of Heaney’s engagement with Catholicism. For this reason, it is the subject of Chapter Four, alongside Heaney’s translation Sweeney Astray, published in the same year. Heavily informed by his reading of Dante, it comes at the mid-point of Heaney’s own life and is the most forthright engagement with the political and religious pieties of his childhood upbringing. I attend to a close reading of the twelve-sequence poem ‘Station Island’, the title poem of the collection, and read it in the context of its draft forms and what Heaney says elsewhere about the poem. I conclude by arguing that rather than resolving Heaney’s complex engagement with Catholicism, Station Island appears to reinforce it. However, as an act of spiritual catharsis, it clears the way for the more visionary and airy poems of subsequent collections. His translation of the Sweeney poem allows Heaney to ventriloquise, from a safe vantage point, his own poetic sense in the person of King Sweeney, who acts as a bridge between the two collections.

The sense of poetic uplift and the attention to absence which Heaney began to explore in The Haw Lantern, soar to new heights in the visionary collection Seeing Things and the two subsequent volumes The Spirit Level and Electric Light. I read Seeing Things alongside Heaney’s uncollected essay ‘Sixth Sense, Seventh Heaven’ and explore the possible influence of the Catholic theologian Jacques Maritain in Heaney’s attention to the surplus nature of language. In the poems of Seeing Things, the world of matter (a dominant theme of Heaney’s early books) gives way increasingly to a more visionary sense. This is picked up in the poems of The Spirit Level where the language of wounds, healing and cures runs as a motif throughout a collection populated by saints, characterised by healing and self-sacrifice. The theme of love and grief is picked up in the poems of Electric Light, and especially in the elegies for literary friends in the second part of the collection. Heaney’s growing sense of the truth of Virgil’s lacrimae rerum (‘the tears of things’) will increasingly inform his final two collections.

Chapter Three explores the elegiac quality of three further collections, and Heaney’s shifting engagement with Catholicism as these develop. I explore how the tactile piety of relics lie behind the poems of North, even if drafts of these poems show how much Heaney redacted Catholic iconography in the published versions. I argue that in 1975, when North was published, the worsening sectarian climate may have encouraged Heaney to avoid language which might suggest a theology of intercession. Field Work contains a number of elegies for those killed in the Troubles and for several poets and friends of Heaney. However, I argue that the collection might also be read as an elegy for Heaney’s Catholic childhood. The note of elegy in these collections is most personal in The Haw Lantern, the first collection of poems published since the death of Heaney’s mother in 1984. ‘Clearances’, the sequence of sonnets written in memory of his mother, inform the whole collection, and in paying close attention to their drafts, I argue that Heaney’s complex engagement with Catholicism is somehow bound up with his relationship with his mother.

Chapter Two follows the chronology of Heaney’s first three collections of poetry, paying attention to early drafts of select poems and Heaney’s own critical commentary in his prose and interviews. I begin by drawing attention to several of the ‘Group’ poems, where Heaney engages with his early religious experience, before moving on to look at a number of poems in Death of a Naturalist which demonstrate the sensuous and tactile appeal of Catholicism for Heaney. I argue that Heaney’s attention to the physicality of the body in Death of a Naturalist is consistent with the body as a unique good in Christian theology. I develop this argument in my discussion of ‘The Forge’ from Door into the Dark, where manual labour is consecrated, and in my discussion of several other poems, whose vocabulary is rich in sacramental language. Finally, I turn to the sacramentality of place in the poems of Wintering Out, and to the ritualized way of life which grounds many of the poems in that collection. I conclude with a discussion of ‘The Tollund Man’ which announces the poems of Heaney’s next collection, North.

Chapter One sets out to trace Heaney’s early Catholic formation at home, school and parish. It begins in his childhood home of Mossbawn, where a strong devotional piety was a product of what the historian Emmet Larkin called the ‘devotional revolution’ of the nineteenth century. Central to this piety was an emphasis on Marian devotion and the visual and tactile appeal of Catholic sacramental practice. The domestic piety of Mossbawn takes a more formal shape in the learning of the catechism at Anahorish Primary School and in more developed catechesis at St Columb’s College in Derry, where Heaney was a boarder. It was at St Columb’s that Heaney first came across the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, the poet who was to have the greatest influence on his early apprentice work. I trace the influence of Hopkins from Heaney’s early unpublished work to later poems such as ‘Seeing the Sick’ in Electric Light. Heaney’s later introduction to the work of Patrick Kavanagh provided him with the validation of his earliest writing instincts about the local landscape and the centrality of parish as a guarantor of the local.

The Introduction begins with a fax which Seamus Heaney sent to Professor Eamon Duffy (Cambridge University) in 2001. The fax was a response to Duffy’s book The Voices of Morebath, in which he tells the story of the desacralising of a small Catholic community during the English Reformation. Heaney’s response to the book draws parallels between the medieval world of Morebath and the world of Mossbawn, where he grew up and which was foundational to his experience of Catholicism and his growth as a poet. I draw attention, in particular, to the centrality of Marian devotion for the parishioners of Morebath and for Heaney as a child. What Heaney’s fax shows is the emotional purchase which Catholicism continued to exert upon him long after he had moved away from adherence to religious orthodoxy or practice. By placing Heaney’s engagement with Catholicism in a broader historical context than has been the case up until now, I show how it operates in ways other than social and political, concluding that Catholicism remains foundational to Heaney’s work at the level of what I call a felt sense.

In the RTÉ documentary Out of the Marvellous, Heaney acknowledges the inevitability of the tears that accompany human experience and recommends that we ready ourselves for them. In the course of this book I have drawn attention to moments where Heaney returns to Virgil’s sense of lacrimae rerum, the tears of things that we cannot avoid. Heaney faced the reality of suffering as a young boy with the death of his brother Christopher. In his mid-thirties, the suffering inflicted by the cruelty of sectarian violence was brought home to him by the death of his second cousin Colum McCartney. His elegy for his murdered cousin begins with an epigraph from Dante’s Purgatorio, and when the ghost of McCartney returns to challenge the poet in Station Island, it is in a Dantean sequence of poems in which Heaney’s art is made to face the reality of suffering by the ghosts of those whose lives have been cut short by violence or by illness.

I read District and Circle (2006) in the context of a poetry of praise and the influence of Czesław Miłosz. Heaney’s poetry of praise is intimately connected to his sense of place and the title of the collection suggests that Heaney is circling back over his childhood district of Mossbawn. When Heaney turns to Virgil in his final collection Human Chain (2010), he does so partly in place of a Catholicism that has been increasingly displaced throughout his work. However, I conclude that the foundational questions of Heaney’s childhood faith – post-mortem existence, how we commune with the dead, the longing for something beyond the bounds of material sense – account, in part, for his turning to Virgil and, specifically, to Book VI of the Aeneid, a full translation of which was posthumously published in 2016. In the end, in a synthesis of Christian and Classical, Heaney’s poetry finds a unifying vision which allows him to retain a felt sense for his Catholic upbringing even as he moves beyond its orthodox expression.