I'm about to compare a poet's changing style to different styles of theatre lighting. If there was a category of blog post entitled 'It's my blog, I can write about whatever the hell I like', this would most certainly be filed under it....
Seamus Heaney said that, like Yeats, he became well known for the style of work that he developed when he was young, only to develop a very different style in his early thirties. He said this shift took place between, on the one side, Death of a Naturalist (1966) and Door into the Dark (1969) and, on the other, Wintering Out (1972) and North (1975).
I was sleepily reading Opened Ground in a train station recently when I realised that I was imagining the these two styles in terms of the two different lighting states I had set up for a play at the Alma Tavern recently. So, the descriptive, explicatory amplitude of Heaney’s first two volumes is, in lighting terms, a warm wash with straw and orange gels (albeit a wash with some dark shadows). Under these lights, Heaney plays the young hero in front of a backdrop of Derry countryside. In Wintering Out and North, the world is seen under a new, picked-out, sharp-edged, lunar light. Under the cold spot, Heaney is a shadowy visitant to his museum exhibits.
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