'Atrocities against his Sacred Poet': The Orpheus Myth and the Poetry of the Northern Irish Troubles

In The Midnight Verdict (1993), Seamus Heaney combines extracts from two
texts taking the poet into the underworld: Ovid’s description in Metamorphoses
of Orpheus’ pursuit of Eurydice and subsequent death, and Brian Merriman’s
Cúirt an Mheán-Oídhche (The Midnight Court). As a poet of conflict, Heaney was
forced to produce his art amid hostile crossfire. Heaney’s fellow Northern Irish
poet Derek Mahon draws heavily on ironized self-sacrifice as a response to
conflict in his ‘Rage for Order’ (1979). When Thomas Kinsella attempts to tackle
the Northern Irish Troubles by apportioning blame to guilty parties, in Butcher’s
Dozen (1972), his response to Bloody Sunday, the results are uneven. In a series
of readings centred on themes of gender and the self-representation of the poet,
this chapter identifies what redress Heaney, Mahon, and Kinsella find for the
‘the atrocities against his sacred poet’ of which Bacchus complains in The
Midnight Verdict.