Henry Hart

Seamus Heaney and Ted Hughes: A Complex Friendship

When Seamus Heaney spoke at Ted Hughes’ funeral in Devon on 3 November 1998, he said that no death had been as devastating to poetry as Hughes’ death, and no death outside his family had hurt him as much. At a memorial service in Westminster Abbey on 3 May 1999, he remarked that Hughes’ coffin at the Devon funeral had reminded him of a boat floating down a river from the Battle of the Somme that Wilfred Owen had once described. Although Heaney didn’t cite the title of Owen’s poem or quote from it, he had in mind the sonnet ‘Hospital Barge at Cerisy’, in which the World War I poet compared the barge to the boat that brought King Arthur to the fabled island of Avalon so he could heal wounds he’d sustained in a much earlier battle. Owen wrote: ‘How unto Avalon, in agony / Kings passed, in the dark barge, which Merlin dreamed.’1 For Heaney, Hughes was not only a wounded king; he was also a Merlin-like dreamer, healer, magician and prophet who mythologized himself in poems and, for better or worse, was mythologized by others. According to Heaney, Hughes had ‘a soothsayer’s awareness that facing a destiny was bound to involve a certain ordeal’. As a result, he ‘recognized that myths and fairy tales were the poetic code’. The fundamental message encoded in Hughes’ poetic myths and fairy tales was that there was a ‘struggle at the heart of things — a struggle in the soil as well as in the soul’.